Lasley is a gifted interlocutor.... The book’s hybrid of ethnography, journalism and disclosure might have been disastrous in the hands of someone without Lasley’s candor and style. Instead, “Sea State” accomplishes what many memoirs do not: It organizes a messy life with a clear vision.” — New York Times Book Review
“A singular and refreshingly candid travel memoir.” — Los Angeles Times
“A peculiar and entrancing blend of memoir and reportage…. Smart about sexual desire and the ease of analyzing — but the difficulty of escaping — familiar gender roles, Sea State offers a close up view of the white, working-class resentments that helped fuel both Brexit and the Trump presidency.” — Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air
“Lasley’s memoir is at its best…a validation of failure, no matter how self-inflicted, as a story in its own right—one that can be told just as well as any other.” — The Nation
“A sharp take on masculinity, class and the intoxicating danger of attraction.” — People
"The hybrid work of memoir and unconventional journalism chronicles Lasley’s doomed romance with Caden alongside a consideration of the dangers of a life of oil extraction. Along the way, she learns not to trust her assumptions about men like Caden, places like Aberdeen, and women like herself." — The Atlantic
“Sea State is so many things at once: an exploration of class, masculinity, desire, and the ways in which the work we do defines us. But alongside these huge subjects, it’s quite simply the story of a young woman who is lonely and finds herself in close proximity to a lot of lonely men. I was so impressed by how deftly Tabitha Lasley moves between the personal and the academic, and how much authority she maintains throughout. This is a truly powerful memoir.” — Mary Beth Keane, author of Ask Again, Yes
“Sea State is, itself, a hybrid of sorts: an investigation that is also a confession but reads a lot like a novel. It is a startlingly original study of love, masculinity and the cost of a profession that few outside of it can truly understand. The cost to Lasley herself is yet to be revealed.” — The Guardian
"Lasley has written a unique book, a cross between Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life: reportage on the English working class that is also a lucid travelogue." — BookForum
“A raw, bold, unsparing memoir.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Acidic, addictive reporting . . . Sea State ’s writing alone is worth the admission price.” — Financial Times
“These are powerful and moving stories of working lives in a dangerous and all-male environment, made all the more powerful by the way Lasley refuses to absent herself from the telling." — The Millions
"In this breathtaking debut, Lasley, a former journalist, interrogates class, love, and politics as she chronicles the months she spent interviewing offshore oil riggers in Aberdeen, Scotland… Rendered in irresistible prose, her whirlwind affair becomes a humanizing subplot and an arresting character study of the prototypical oil rigger, one who compartmentalizes home and work, wife and mistress, lavish spending and crushing isolation. The result is a compassionate portrayal of what it takes to survive an inhospitable corner of the world." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Grippingly candid and savagely self-aware.” — Esquire (UK)
"In these accounts of the offshore men who do our dirty work for us, Tabitha Lasley has struck black gold. These are powerful and moving stories of working lives in a dangerous and all-male environment, made all the more powerful by the way Lasley refuses to absent herself from the telling. The writing is carefully and unobtrusively polished, with hard edges and unflinching clarity, and a memorable turn of phrase. Sea State marks the arrival of a gifted and exciting new voice." — Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13
“By any measure it’s extraordinary. It takes you to places so few books do.” — The Observer
“Reading Lasley’s prose is like having a long conversation with someone highly intelligent, intuitive and more sensitive than she dares let on.” — The Spectator
“[Lasley] has the skill, a Joan Didion kind of skill, of inflecting non-fiction material subjectively, a habit of assessing situations via her nervous system. . . . Sea State has all the presentness of fiction, as well as the exactitude of the non-fiction novel and the gleam of confession. [Lasley] conjures an industry and a place, but much more than that, she shows us the men themselves, and their relation to her, a mysterious tale of love and fear.” — Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books
"Piercing, brutally candid, addictive. Sea State is a memoir like no other: one of the best I've read about men and women, about social class and, above all, about female desire. If you were gripped by Lisa Taddeo's Three Women , this is for you." — Rachel Cooke, author of Her Brilliant Career
"A breathtakingly bold, honest and original book, I didn't want it to end." — Decca Aitkenhead, author of All at Sea
"Tabitha Lasley throws herself into a dangerous, liminal world and crawls back battered, chastened, bearing a haul glittering with insight. Brilliantly propulsive." — Aida Edemariam, author of The Wife's Tale
Sea State is, itself, a hybrid of sorts: an investigation that is also a confession but reads a lot like a novel. It is a startlingly original study of love, masculinity and the cost of a profession that few outside of it can truly understand. The cost to Lasley herself is yet to be revealed.
"Lasley has written a unique book, a cross between Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life: reportage on the English working class that is also a lucid travelogue."
Lasley’s memoir is at its best…a validation of failure, no matter how self-inflicted, as a story in its own right—one that can be told just as well as any other.
Lasley is a gifted interlocutor.... The book’s hybrid of ethnography, journalism and disclosure might have been disastrous in the hands of someone without Lasley’s candor and style. Instead, “Sea State” accomplishes what many memoirs do not: It organizes a messy life with a clear vision.
New York Times Book Review
A sharp take on masculinity, class and the intoxicating danger of attraction.”
A peculiar and entrancing blend of memoir and reportage…. Smart about sexual desire and the ease of analyzing — but the difficulty of escaping — familiar gender roles, Sea State offers a close up view of the white, working-class resentments that helped fuel both Brexit and the Trump presidency.
Sea State is so many things at once: an exploration of class, masculinity, desire, and the ways in which the work we do defines us. But alongside these huge subjects, it’s quite simply the story of a young woman who is lonely and finds herself in close proximity to a lot of lonely men. I was so impressed by how deftly Tabitha Lasley moves between the personal and the academic, and how much authority she maintains throughout. This is a truly powerful memoir.
A singular and refreshingly candid travel memoir.
"The hybrid work of memoir and unconventional journalism chronicles Lasley’s doomed romance with Caden alongside a consideration of the dangers of a life of oil extraction. Along the way, she learns not to trust her assumptions about men like Caden, places like Aberdeen, and women like herself."
A singular and refreshingly candid travel memoir.
Acidic, addictive reporting . . . Sea State ’s writing alone is worth the admission price.
Acidic, addictive reporting . . . Sea State ’s writing alone is worth the admission price.
These are powerful and moving stories of working lives in a dangerous and all-male environment, made all the more powerful by the way Lasley refuses to absent herself from the telling."
Grippingly candid and savagely self-aware.”
By any measure it’s extraordinary. It takes you to places so few books do.
"In these accounts of the offshore men who do our dirty work for us, Tabitha Lasley has struck black gold. These are powerful and moving stories of working lives in a dangerous and all-male environment, made all the more powerful by the way Lasley refuses to absent herself from the telling. The writing is carefully and unobtrusively polished, with hard edges and unflinching clarity, and a memorable turn of phrase. Sea State marks the arrival of a gifted and exciting new voice."
"Piercing, brutally candid, addictive. Sea State is a memoir like no other: one of the best I've read about men and women, about social class and, above all, about female desire. If you were gripped by Lisa Taddeo's Three Women , this is for you."
Reading Lasley’s prose is like having a long conversation with someone highly intelligent, intuitive and more sensitive than she dares let on.
"A breathtakingly bold, honest and original book, I didn't want it to end."
"Tabitha Lasley throws herself into a dangerous, liminal world and crawls back battered, chastened, bearing a haul glittering with insight. Brilliantly propulsive."
[Lasley] has the skill, a Joan Didion kind of skill, of inflecting non-fiction material subjectively, a habit of assessing situations via her nervous system. . . . Sea State has all the presentness of fiction, as well as the exactitude of the non-fiction novel and the gleam of confession. [Lasley] conjures an industry and a place, but much more than that, she shows us the men themselves, and their relation to her, a mysterious tale of love and fear.”
07/01/2021
Liberated of both job and relationship, journalist Lasley moved from London to Aberdeen and, as she relates in Sea State, worked on an oil rig—the better to understand how men behave with no women around and to witness masculine culture suddenly in crisis (50,000-copy first printing). In Cokie , Roberts recalls distinguished journalist Cokie Roberts, his wife of 53 years (150,000-copy first printing). A two-time All Pro Linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Shazier suffered a spinal-cord injury during a game and had to learn to walk again before he could finally dance with his wife at their wedding—a Walking Miracle that required the perseverance and strength he now applies to his post-game life (50,000-copy first printing). Having immigrated to the United States as a toddler, been paralyzed owing to gunshot as a gang member, and become an English professor after earning a master's degree in medieval literature, Silva addresses The Death of My Father the Pope , recalling a man who was an abusive alcoholic (originally scheduled for August; 30,000-copy first printing). As beloved British novelist Thomas relates in 41-Love , at age 41 she was healthier than ever and happily ensconced with a partner yet faced painful obstacles—the death of loved ones, the realization that she would never have children—that compelled her to return to an early love of her life: tennis. In A Calm Chaos , Walker, the psychiatrist on Bravo's Married to Medicine series and one of Essence 's "Woke 100," relates life with a distant, addicted father, her own struggles with depression, and the later-in-life realization that her immigrant grandmother was bipolar, all contributing to her commitment to work with people who are mentally ill in inner cities (40,000-copy first printing).
Billie Fulford-Brown masterfully narrates this fascinating hybrid tale—part journalism, part memoir—of a 30-something woman who leaves London for Scotland to learn about the workers of offshore oil rigs. Against the backdrop of hardscrabble Aberdeen, Fulford-Brown brings a clear, inviting voice to the author, allowing a touch of Lasley’s Liverpool background to enter the posh accent. With youthful calm, Fulford-Brown depicts a recklessness that at times causes one to catch one’s breath as Lasley immerses herself professionally and personally in the world of North Sea oil workers. Fulford-Brown’s seamless shifts into a northeastern Scots accent adds to her portrayals. These are memorable characters whose tales of living for months on “floating bombs” are delivered in dismissive masculine tones—as if being told over pub drinks. D.H.R. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Billie Fulford-Brown masterfully narrates this fascinating hybrid tale—part journalism, part memoir—of a 30-something woman who leaves London for Scotland to learn about the workers of offshore oil rigs. Against the backdrop of hardscrabble Aberdeen, Fulford-Brown brings a clear, inviting voice to the author, allowing a touch of Lasley’s Liverpool background to enter the posh accent. With youthful calm, Fulford-Brown depicts a recklessness that at times causes one to catch one’s breath as Lasley immerses herself professionally and personally in the world of North Sea oil workers. Fulford-Brown’s seamless shifts into a northeastern Scots accent adds to her portrayals. These are memorable characters whose tales of living for months on “floating bombs” are delivered in dismissive masculine tones—as if being told over pub drinks. D.H.R. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
★ 2021-10-07
When Lasley traveled to Aberdeen from London, she had one goal: to write about life on oil rigs and “see what men [were] like with no women around.” Her motivations were complex. She lost a book she was writing on oil rigs when her laptop was stolen from an apartment she shared with an abusive man she had tried to leave two times before. Her first interview subject was Caden, a married offshore oil rigger Lasley met as soon as she arrived. The attraction was immediate and powerful, and the two began an affair as the author started her research. The process of oil extraction, writes Lasley, involves a “pitched battle among human ingenuity, inhospitable terrain and highly combustible materials. The dangers are compounded by the locations’ remoteness.” Disasters, such as the Piper Alpha explosion in the North Sea in 1988, left many men traumatized. Yet working-class men continued to seek work on oil rigs because the onshore heavy-industry jobs on which they could count had all but disappeared. As Lasley discovered in her brief affair with Caden, offshore work culture created “antifemale paranoia” toward “women who ‘trapped’ them with pregnancy, spirited children away over borders…[and] pauperized them in divorce settlements.” Unlike the middle-class and educated author, other women on shore did not have the independent means to start their lives anew. Onshore jobs were as scarce for them as they were for men, and few women were willing to work on the rigs. In poetically hard-edged prose, Lasley explores offshore rigging culture and the anti–workers’ rights culture that created it. She also shows how the hypermuscular capitalism in which it is entrenched deforms, and often destroys, relationships.
A raw, bold, unsparing memoir.
