This is My Sea: The Number 1 Irish Bestseller
£12.20£14.20 (-14%)
‘Full of wisdom and poetry and epic emotion, This is My Sea explores grief, memory and loss through vivid words and striking imagery. It echoes lost summers and the beauty of life, like a shell held to the ear’ – Ed O’Loughlin, author of The Last Good Funeral of the Year
Over the course of seven difficult years Miriam Mulcahy lost her mother, father and sister, each grief threatening to drown her. But instead of going under she discovered the lessons of the sea, letting the water teach her how to get through anything in life: one breath builds on another, another stroke, another kick and you will get home.
THIS IS MY SEA takes our greatest fear, death, and wraps it up in language so fine and beautiful that the reader is carried along and comforted by how completely lost Miriam was and how she found solace in all the things that sustained her: books, music, art, friends, love, swimming, and of course the sea.
For fans of The Salt Path by Raynor Winn and I Found my Tribe by Ruth Fitzmaurice.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Eriu (24 Aug. 2023) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 224 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 1804184004 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1804184004 |
| Dimensions | 14.4 x 2.4 x 22.2 cm |
by Kathiea
This book is a strong book, as strong as the sea. It finds words to describe grief that truly resonate with me. It is a powerful reminder that we can swim towards the light.
by Alice
This is a beautifully written personal story. The writers deep family connection with the sea is woven throughout. There are movingly honest accounts of family relationships over a period of huge loss, and reflections on grief and existentialism that draw on the writer’s favourite literature – Camus and others. I really enjoyed this book!
by Amazon Customer
Beautifully written book that I would take most people could relate too. There are moments of humour, sadness and courage in this novel.
by Cookery lover
There is a skill in being able to write movingly about bereavement, making its most mundane aspects unbearably sad, without having to actually keep using the words ‘grief’, ‘tragedy’, ‘devastation’ etc. If you like spare and economical writing on death, this is not it. This book is wall-to-wall sea, topography and orienteering metaphors. Grief is loudly signposted by “peaks of devastation”, “huge yawning chasms” and “massive craters”.
The chapters about the deaths of Mulcahy’s elderly parents are so overwrought that my empathy disappeared down one of her craters. When her father dies, she is “left behind, on land, in a world we could not navigate, broken, shattered, smashed … How could we walk a single step without him?”…. “The world is now a series of massive craters, waiting for us to tumble in. There are impossibly high mountains we will never be able to climb and treacherous marshes and swamps that will swallow us whole”.
This book may be more relatable if you idolize your parents: “How can you trust in anything when the man you most adored, the man you loved most in all the world, the man who was the ground beneath your feet, whose eyes you only had to look into to know how loved you were….. is being wheeled to the morgue?”. And soon after: “How would we know we were loved without being able to look into his eyes?”.
Breaking the news to her kids that their grandfather is dead is “telling them the untellable”. She is furious at acquaintances who offer platitudes. “People didn’t know; they could not know. They ran from us.” I had to remind myself that she was talking about her father dying at 68 of “heart disease and damage caused by forty years of heavy, relentless smoking”. To other people, “such a tragedy happening to them quite simply did not bear thinking about”. Seriously? Even Mulcahy says later that “everyone has a bypass story (this is Ireland, after all)”.
Her mother dies of cancer in her 70s and she rages: “Why her? Why me, again, why us?”. Her anger becomes “an anchor to moor myself in an unpredictable sea”. Then, again: “anger, my only anchor in an oarless, rudderless, sail-less boat”. I found one florid chapter so crammed with sea metaphors that I almost gave up: “You are in a tiny boat, helpless and defenceless before the shadow of the rock. There is no sail, no rudder, no oars, no engine. Your world has lost its shape, its form, its parameters and boundaries have dissolved and disappeared. There is nothing here but sky and water, water everywhere, and the vast deeps and kelp forests below you that are alive. You are floating on top of another universe. How easily that surface shatters. The worst thing possible has happened. I have lost the person I needed the most”. ….. “This is not a tide that goes out. It’s a whirlpool, constantly churning and if you get trapped in it, can take you down.”
I found most of the writing overworked and repetitive. “… you’re here without navigation, without maps. Yes, you have a compass somewhere, but you pull it out, and its arrow swings wildly, incomprehensibly. It’s no longer working”. And then, again: “Our compasses swung wildly”. And later, she and her kids “are like a compass, I think. They are the directions, and I am the arrow”…. “I place the map in their hands; I show them the stars, tell them to always know where north is”. Ugh.
The section about her sister’s death earned the 3 stars. Objectively, from a stranger’s point of view, this is a genuine and awful tragedy and is well written. In contrast to the tsunami of gush about her parents, the siblings’ relationship is complicated and much more interesting to readers who don’t know the family. It could have formed the basis of a much better book. The section about her kids, however (“This summer Aoibh flew to Boston with a gang of her friends to work for the summer”) should have been saved for the annual Christmas card to friends and family.
Much of the content just isn’t as fascinatingly tragic enough to readers as it is to Mulcahy and family, and as an examination of grief it just felt too forced and overblown to be moving or relatable.
by Amazon Customer
Excellent honest account of the pain of grief and the power of the sea in easing pain from that grief.
by Amazon Customer
A raw yet very honest book on the author’s experience with grief and how it has impacted her life. The descriptions and memories of the people she lost are so beautifully written it’s easy to paint a picture of what they where like. Not only does it create a wonderful connection to all the feelings and changes that come with grief, that you will resonate with. It creates a huge understanding that in such a lonely time in your life you are not alone and everything you feel is normal. Although her storey is heartbreaking, you can’t help but find peace and comfort from her words… It’s a book I can’t recommend highly enough and one that will forever sit proudly on my bookshelf…
by Angela
An utterly heartbreaking story of loss and grief and the ability to find that place on earth where we can almost reach our loved ones.
by Niamh Cunningham
‘This is My Sea’ is a beautifully written honest account of life, love and death and the resilience of the human spirit to keep moving forward when grenades of grief are fired our way.
Grief changes us forever. We never totally heal from the pain when our loved ones leave us or when close relationships break down. No one gets through life unscathed but there a few who get more than their fair share or find themselves in the upper echelons of the hierarchy of grief.
In the military terms ‘echelon’ means a formation of troops, ships, aircraft, or vehicles in parallel rows with the end of each row projecting further than the one in front. And of course when out front you bear the brunt of the bullets fired your way. ‘This is My Sea is a beautifully written account of one woman’s experience of death been fired at her in quick succession. Miriam’s writing is so beautiful and honest and paints a very vivid picture of that raw suffocating grief we encounter when those we love most are ripped from our lives. Through those beautifully words you start to find threads of hope that you can find happiness again and in Miriam’s case it was the healing affect of the sea.
This book was a compelling read and it’s words sang from the pages. It took me a while to write this review as I needed to let the beautiful words settle into my soul.