Sea State

A Memoir

By: Tabitha Lasley

Narrated by: Billie Fulford-Brown

A Recommended Read from: Vogue * The Los Angeles Times * Publishers Weekly * The Week * Lit Hub

A stunning and brutally honest memoir that shines a light on what happens when female desire conflicts with a culture of masculinity in crisis

In her mid-30s 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, and competition. The longer she stayed, the more she found her presence had a destabilizing effect on the men — and her.

Sea State is on the one hand a portrait of an overlooked industry: “Offshore” is a way of life for generations of primarily working-class men and also a potent metaphor for those parts of life we keep at bay — class, masculinity, the transactions of desire, and the awful slipperiness of a ladder that could, if we tried hard enough, lead us to security.

Sea State is on the other hand the story of a journalist whose professional distance from her subject becomes perilously thin. In Aberdeen, Tabitha gets high and dances with abandon, reliving her youth, when the music was good and the boys were bad. Twenty years on, there is Caden: a married rig worker who spends three weeks on and three weeks off. Alone and in an increasingly precarious state, Tabitha dives into their growing attraction. The relationship, reckless and explosive, will lay them both bare.

©2021 Ecco (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers

Well written meandering story.

I was lured in with the writing and got a well narrated, well written view on a world of, I guess, on shore women evolving around off shore men and a bit of their rigs. And some drugs.
Not bad but nothing spectacular either.

Beautifully Gritty and Poignant

A story of intersecting worlds and a game of mistrust and yearning in the face of straining industry.

Good Story

The writer is a good storyteller, a good blend of northern England’s culture, the offshore rig industry, and a romance thrown in too!

Not for me

I really didn’t enjoy this book. I finished it but I probably wouldn’t recommend.

The synopsis blurb was better than the book.

Terrible execution

This book is terrible. The cover is gorgeous.

A more accurate blurb: this is a memoir of a woman that WANTS to write a book about rig men but instead has an affair with the very first rig man that she meets. The book she wants to write would be deeply flawed by design (she wants to know how men and masculinity exist in a world without women by inserting herself as the lone woman in that space. Methodology: interview men while drinking and flirting with them in bars). This book prioritizes her sex life, then it leans into simple justifications of her bad decisions and cherry picked facts about rig men, followed by a lot of drunk whining about how she wants to write a book about these poor misunderstood white men.

Good luck getting through the opening “identity politics overlooks the ordinary people that really matter” diatribe.

It’s about sex not oil

Not at all what I thought it would be about. I quit after chapter 5, she should have told more about e on the rigs first, I’d have read more of the book.