Tabitha Lasley's Sea State: A Moving Memoir of a Life at Sea

Amazon Customer: I came for the oil workers, but stayed for the writers memoir. Not at all what I excpected, but better. Damn good, jus read it will you?

United States on Aug 22, 2022

2 Shay: A must read...Dam it good. When is the movie people

United States on Aug 11, 2022

CASSINI24: Tabitha Lasley spent several months in Aberdeen with the aim of interviewing oil rig workers and writing about their lives. But this is not the book she has produced - it is instead an account of her own life during this period - her love affair with a reckless and childish married man and the consequences of that relationship, played out in the bars, and cheap hotels of Aberdeen, peppered with episodic interviews with other offshore workers.

As a backdrop, she does describe the declining North Sea oil industry, with rigs being decommissioned, and the demographics of offshore workers changing, but she doesn't really penetrate this in any detail, nor do we hear anything of how Aberdeen is trying to reconfigure itself to stay alive and relevant, by becoming a hub for the transition from fossil fuels to renewables for example. Instead we learn more about the drugs that Lasley took, the clothes she wore and the music she listened to.

Having said all this, the memoir is exceptionally well-written. Lasley is more than a journalist - she is a very good writer indeed . For this reason - although this wasn't quite the book I was anticipating - I give it 4 stars.

United Kingdom on Jun 04, 2022

T.O.C.: I enjoyed how succinctly the author portrayed a variety of interviews. I love how honest she was about her own failings. I appreciate the several aspects discussed….safety issues on the rigs, the disjointed lifestyle of the workers, cultural pressure on young poor men from industrialized towns, the shabby role and treatment of women by this culture. I will recommend this book to my book club.

United States on Apr 11, 2022

reader: Sea state is a real page turner, but full of astute insights into relations between working class men and women in a post-industrial part of the world. The world of oil rigs she describes is pretty dark, but Lasley is such a gifted writer that even her darkest stories light up the page. Give the book a slight twist and it could be set off southern Louisiana instead on the oil rigs of the North Sea. Often a writer has a great style and great story telling instincts, but the material they write about is pretty humdrum. Or the reverse: they have a rare, new story to tell, but the prose is clunky. Lasley is that rare writer who ticks both boxes. She has opened up a whole new world for me and has done so with a unique, darkly lyrical, at times almost poetic voice. Although she doesn't say this directly, I read the book as an implicit indictment of today's raw capitalism, the churning neoliberal greed that is heedless of human lives. Just brilliant, this book.

United States on Dec 30, 2021

kathleen g: Yes the writing is wonderful but halfway through I'd had enough of Lasley who I wanted to tell to just grow up. This isn't a story about the men who work on the offshore oil rigs, although they loom large and I learned a lot. It's the story of Lasley's failed relationship with one of them and how she spun out during a 6 month stint in Aberdeen when she was meant to be writing a book. No moral judgment on her affair with Caden but it became increasingly clear to me that this wasn't a grand romance between people who are different in so many ways (particularly revealing, I think was that she kept and laid out the list of what he would eat.). There's excessive alcohol use, drug use, and so on. Points to Lasley to laying herself bare for this but that may not be a positive. Thanks to edelweiss for the ARC. I'm not sure why she irritated me so much but she sure did.

United States on Dec 07, 2021

SDev: This book is so special, it’s unlike anything I have read before. The writing style is second to none with sharp descriptions, and punchy language. I couldn’t put it down and enjoyed every word.

It’s about her relationship with a married rigger but is peppered with stories and facts from the oil industry, giving an interesting insight into the life of riggers both on and offshore.

I particularly liked the last chapter where as she is leaving Aberdeen she tells the end of her Caden story to a rigger she meets. This made the book come full circle for me as she was the one interviewing and listening to riggers’ stories throughout the book, the whole reason she went to Aberdeen to write the book in the first place. Now she has the final say and gets to tell her story, tying up the book nicely.

Many reviews say the book is about men, class, marriage, desire but for me the strong theme running through it was ‘home’ with the author trying to figure out what, where, and who, her home is.

Overall a brilliant read and very clever - I can’t wait for her next book.

United Kingdom on Feb 11, 2021

MISS S J ELLIS: A debut from a former journalist who writes with poetic precision. The book couples keen observational journalistic skills (including transcripts from interviews) with lucid prose, so exact, the words are so carefully placed.
Some reviews that I have read of this book focus on the moral element of the writer's choice to have an affair with a married man. If this were a novel, the choice of a writer to fictionalise an affair would not be criticised so this point, I believe, is moot.
When I read, I don't read to make a moral judgement, I don't want to exist above the characters or the writers, looking down on them. Instead I want to experience things along with them; through their words, through what is shown to me rather than what is told to me. When I read 'Sea State' I could clearly feel things that Lasley wasn't explicitly telling me.
It is very funny, sardonic even. Lasley is always the cleverest person in the room, she doesn't tell us this, it is patent.
It is really sad. There is an pervasive notion of it being a last ditch attempt, after a life time of car crash relationships. Despite the bravado, the slut dress and fake feckles, Lasley says 'I was nobody's...

United Kingdom on Feb 09, 2021

ToneLa: Tricky book. It's brilliantly written, you feel for her, and she paints amazing scenes. There is a decent wedge of what I thought it was supposed to be about - the life on an oil rig, the dying industry of oil.

Instead she hooks up with a conman early and 70% of the book is shot through with the mournful depression of losing a love who wasn't genuine with her in the first place. It's powerful, but.... she never visits a rig, never shows us more than a couple of interviews (she interviewed 103?) , and is oddly squeamish on certain specifics ("I returned to my hometown... this man was a few junctions down... My hometown is poor...").

So. Mixed feelings. I tore through it in days and some of it really resonated. It captured a certain culture for sure.

However it's pretty much a relationship book shot through with obligatory-feeling chapters about the oil game - and not even frequently. I don't know what she learned. She doesn't really say anything that hints of this.

So I'd recommend it, sure... but I'm not sure in what way. "You should read this book if you like ____________"... what? Well written prose that occasionally comes off gonzo (this is a genre...

United Kingdom on Feb 06, 2021

Nellig: The quality of the writing is amazing. Everything is described so vividly and cinematically that you can practically smell it. Characters leap off the page, deftly conjured with a few physical details and a memorable turn of phrase. I wolfed the whole book in a few sittings, and stayed up way past my bedtime. It’s as delicious and addictive as piping-hot gossip from an articulate and unguarded friend.

The whole thing is an odd mix of serious journalism and memoir, with a dark undertow of dread and longing. The author has spent a worrying amount of time hanging out in scary bars in Aberdeen, half-cut, interviewing fairly terrifying men. She got some good stuff. There are flashes of real insight into the profound horribleness of offshore life, along with equally compelling details about an ill-advised affair with an oil-rig worker (it doesn’t sound all that much fun, and ends predictably badly).

If Tabitha Lasley speaks as well as she writes, she’ll absolutely kill it on the talk-show and podcast interview circuit. I’ll read anything she publishes.

United Kingdom on Feb 06, 2021