The Shell and the Octopus: A Memoir

by Rebecca Stirling

Overview

This is the story of Rebecca Stirling’s childhood: a young girl raised by the sea, by men, and by literature. Circumnavigating the world on a thirty-foot sailboat, the Stirlings spend weeks at a time on the open ocean, surviving storms and visiting uncharted islands and villages. Ushered through her young life by a father who loves adventure, women, and extremes, Rebecca befriends “working girls” in the ports they visit (as they are often the only other females present in the bars that they end up in) and, on the boat, falls in love with her crewmate and learns to live like the men around her. But her driven nature and the role models in the books she reads make her determined to be a lady, continue her education, begin a career, live in a real home, and begin a family of her own. Once she finally gets away from the boat and her dad and sets to work upon making her own dream a reality, however, Rebecca begins to realize life is not what she thought it would be—and when her father dies in a tragic accident, she must return to her old life to sift through the mess and magic he has left behind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647423230
Publisher:	She Writes Press
Publication date:	07/26/2022
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Rebecca Stirling lives between Aspen, Colorado, and Kauai, Hawaii, with her two children. She teaches creative art and writing classes to help spread the knowledge and ingenuity of world cultures. She continues to sail and travel, read and write, and has a love for the stories individuals, cultures, and our earth have to tell.

Table of Contents

Part I

1 Accident 15

2 Earth Angels 21

3 Funeral 24

4 Roots 31

5 Wendy 35

6 The Legal System 38

7 Peng Chau 44

8 Queen of the Sulu Sea 50

9 Seychelles 54

10 Europe 59

11 Marsh Harbour 62

12 Colorado Mountains 65

13 Sleepy Cat Motel 67

14 Wild Horses 71

15 Florida 73

16 Cuba 75

17 Hymen 82

18 Cayman Islands 86

19 Jamaica 92

20 Magic Ocean Watch 96

21 Colorado 101

22 School 106

23 Dr. Manship 109

24 Saat Kaur 113

25 Sextant 116

26 Molokai 118

27 Kauai 121

Part II

28 Young Adulthood 125

29 Port Vila, Vanuatu 128

30 Sail from Port Vila 133

31 Solomon Islands 140

32 Espiritu Santo 144

33 Honiara 152

34 Russell Islands 160

35 Deep Dive 172

36 An Island Near Port Gizo 175

37 The Other World 182

38 Sail from Gizo to Thursday Island 185

39 Thursday Island 190

40 New Zealand 203

41 College 208

Part III

42 Big Island 213

43 Grey Beard 216

44 Lee Lee 219

45 Ujung Pandang, Makassar, Indonesia 225

46 Sail to Sumatra 230

47 Jakarta 236

48 Career 254

49 Memory 261

Part IV

50 Motherhood 263

51 Everything 266

52 Sulu Sea 268

53 Wings 270

54 Breaking Free 274

55 Nowhere to Hide 278

56 Impermanence 281

Editorial Reviews

A poignant and lyrical read that will ring true with sailors and interest landlubbers.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“. . . conveys a message of hope, clarity, patience, acceptance, understanding, and non-conformity to the reader. The author makes the reader think and re-think actions and incidents that helped shape their own life. A most interesting memoir.”
—Readers’ Favorite, 5-star review

“The Shell and the Octopus is an insightful coming-of-age memoir about a strong and compassionate woman. Raised by her unstable father aboard a thirty-foot sailboat, Rebecca Stirling’s haphazard adventures allow her to make peace with herself in a dangerous and gorgeous world. She is an everywoman, and yet not like anyone else you’ve ever met.”
—Leslie Johansen Nack, author of The Blue Butterfly

From the Publisher

2022-03-25
A memoir of life with a peripatetic father who had an unquenchable passion for the sea.

Stirling first boarded a sailboat in the early 1970s, when she was just a toddler. The small custom-built sailing yacht Cattle Creek, which her father constructed in Peng Chau, Hong Kong, would become the most consistent home that Stirling would know for more than 20 years. Her earliest memories are of being at sea with her parents; she describes her young-child wonderment, lying on her mother’s lap on deck, looking at the moon: “She comes bright in the black night sky like a surprise, illuminating her path to us. She instigates the plankton in our wake and they glow like fairy dust.” By the time she was 4, she’d sailed from Peng Chau to Manila, on to Singapore, across the Indian Ocean to the Seychelles, and then flown with her mother to Europe, winding up on the Isle of Wight, where she briefly attended kindergarten. In between voyages, the American family was based in Colorado, where the author’s father built houses and acquired real estate holdings. When she was 10, her parents divorced, but by then she’d absorbed her father’s love of sailing as well as his restlessness. Over the next years, she joined him, his friends, and his girlfriends on journeys traversing the Caribbean and the South Pacific. This is a memoir of coming of age on the high seas, and in it, the author offers a collection of vivid portraits of places and relationships, including her first serious romance. Readers will almost feel the misty saltwater coming over the bow, the discomfort of the primitive in-cabin accommodations, and the raw frustrations of a young girl dealing with a father who was “so happy when…leaving port” but sullen, agitated, and often intoxicated onshore. Although the accounts of Stirling’s early memories are fragmented, recollections from later years, culled from her journals, are viscerally and eloquently detailed descriptions of the beauty, loneliness, and rowdiness of the extraordinary world of her formative years.

A poignant and lyrical read that will ring true with sailors and interest landlubbers.

Kirkus Reviews