Menu
Maybe someday
34
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
1/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Tabitha Lasley
Publisher:
Ecco
Date:
December 7, 2021
In her midthirties and newly free from a terrible relationship, Tabitha Lasley quit her job at a London magazine, packed her bags, and poured her savings into a six-month lease on an apartment in Aberdeen, Scotland. She decided to make good on a long-deferred idea for a book about oil rigs and the men who work on them. Why oil rigs? She wanted to see what men were like with no women around. In Aberdeen, Tabitha became deeply entrenched in the world of roughnecks, a teeming subculture rich with brawls, hard labor, competition, and the deepest friendships imaginable. The longer she stayed, the more she found her presence had a destabilizing effect on the menâand her.
What The Reviewers Say
Sea State is...a mixture of journalism, chronicling the sociological, financial and more immediately physical issues faced by the men...as well as the effect this work has on their wives, families and the wider society.
... a peculiar and entrancing blend of memoir and reportage.
If many autofictionists are interior writers with all the lights on, mansions of subjective quirks, Lasley is the whole street, with a much more connected sense of other people. She takes for granted an unapologetic tone we used only to associate with male writers.
Lasley is a gifted interlocutor, teasing out startling confessions (one of her 103 interviewees confesses to a murder) and insights about the cliques, fights and hierarchies of a dangerous vocation. 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..
