rick2's review
2.0
False pretext. This is a coming of age, finding yourself memoir masquerading as a sociological study. As a sociological study it’s not good. As a memoir it’s middling to ok.
I wanted to read a good literary nonfiction book about what this book ostensibly proposes to be about, masculinity and oil rig workers. I imagined maybe a George Orwell esque, Road to Wigan Pier, perhaps a sort of sexed up ethnography about this topic.
Instead, this is essentially Eat Pray Love among the oilfield workers where the author finds herself by making bad decisions with a married man and journeys around commentating on things, less so on the overall dynamic, and more on how she feels about it. Which is an acceptable type of book, just not not what I was looking for.
The writing is decent. Content was frustrating.
I wanted to read a good literary nonfiction book about what this book ostensibly proposes to be about, masculinity and oil rig workers. I imagined maybe a George Orwell esque, Road to Wigan Pier, perhaps a sort of sexed up ethnography about this topic.
Instead, this is essentially Eat Pray Love among the oilfield workers where the author finds herself by making bad decisions with a married man and journeys around commentating on things, less so on the overall dynamic, and more on how she feels about it. Which is an acceptable type of book, just not not what I was looking for.
The writing is decent. Content was frustrating.
h4nnah_graham's review against another edition
emotional
funny
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
hayleighlouise's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
burnsreadsbooks's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
5.0
cattytrona's review against another edition
3.0
Seems like I had a relatively unique experience with this book, in that I knew it was mostly affair, and that was the part I felt less than satisfied with. I wanted it to be more academic, not in its study of oil life (although that was also lacking; not to be an academic but there is training for this stuff, you can’t just go and interview people) but in its self reflection. I guess I was expecting auto-ethnography, not biography. But even then…
Most of what I know about memoir comes from the Celebrity Memoir Book Club podcast, and there’s this thing the presenters point out sometimes, which is that a celebrity author is too close to that part of their life to properly relay it. They’re still caught up in personal feelings, and haven’t found the distance necessary to reflect on, learn from, and understand the importance of it. It’s not that (I think) it’s necessary to learn from all experiences, but if you’re writing it down, you need to know why you’re sharing, and have something to build to, even if it’s just futility. That is the feeling of the situation in Sea State, but I never got the sense it was the actual aim of relaying it. But what that was, I’m not sure, and possibly, neither is the author.
I also felt a weird disconnect between her perspective and mine: an age thing. There was something millennial about the assumptions about gender and all, that felt outdated to me. I’m barely not a millennial too. In some counts I still am. And yet. I’m sure I read books with those kind of gaps all the time, but something about this being memoir broadened them, made them more evident.
Although: is this memoir? The book opens with one of those ‘no relation to persons living or dead’ disclaimers, which I genuinely thought was so interesting. I wish it had done more with that, in the text itself. Had ruptured, a little, had embraced fictionality as a method, had reminded the reader that these aren’t real people (wink). Because otherwise, what was up with that. Idk
Most of what I know about memoir comes from the Celebrity Memoir Book Club podcast, and there’s this thing the presenters point out sometimes, which is that a celebrity author is too close to that part of their life to properly relay it. They’re still caught up in personal feelings, and haven’t found the distance necessary to reflect on, learn from, and understand the importance of it. It’s not that (I think) it’s necessary to learn from all experiences, but if you’re writing it down, you need to know why you’re sharing, and have something to build to, even if it’s just futility. That is the feeling of the situation in Sea State, but I never got the sense it was the actual aim of relaying it. But what that was, I’m not sure, and possibly, neither is the author.
I also felt a weird disconnect between her perspective and mine: an age thing. There was something millennial about the assumptions about gender and all, that felt outdated to me. I’m barely not a millennial too. In some counts I still am. And yet. I’m sure I read books with those kind of gaps all the time, but something about this being memoir broadened them, made them more evident.
Although: is this memoir? The book opens with one of those ‘no relation to persons living or dead’ disclaimers, which I genuinely thought was so interesting. I wish it had done more with that, in the text itself. Had ruptured, a little, had embraced fictionality as a method, had reminded the reader that these aren’t real people (wink). Because otherwise, what was up with that. Idk