This I have come to believe: when a boat goes down, it’s only the shell of things — the hull and the bodies — that vanish. When there are no survivors and no meaningful recovery of wreckage, there’s only speculation, the barest possibility of ever knowing what happened, and the legacies of unresolved grief. The absence of the dead shapes the story of the living.
Some memoirs satisfy with their shocking tales, some satisfy with their thoughtful analysis of the common human story, and every once in a while, I discover a memoir that combines each of these elements with beautiful language and I find myself moved and enlightened in a way that it would be hard for a novel to match. Set Adrift is one such rare and perfect gem: Sarah Conover was a toddler when she and her sister were orphaned by a family yachting accident, and as her grandparents, in particular, were persons of note in the community, Conover is able to explore both the public record of their disappearance and her own private struggle with growing up as an orphan in the middle of a large and broken family. I was fascinated by everything here — Conover shares much about her situation that was surprising to me — and I am enlarged by having learned of her journey to wholeness. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
For years, I blithely summarized the accident and its aftermath in careless shorthand to others: My parents, Lori and Larry Conover, grandparents, Harvey and Dorothy Conover, as well as family friend Bill Fluegelman, drowned during a freak storm in the Bermuda Triangle. My parents left behind two young orphans — my sister Aileen, almost three at the time, and me, eighteen months old. People would look to me for some clue as to how I felt but would find little in my affect to guide them. I’d been schooled in dissociation and numbness: no Conover ever spoke of the perishing. None of my parents’ generation could bear this cataclysmic break in their lives.
The Conovers were an uncommonly experienced boating family: Sarah’s grandfather, Harry Conover, was a competitive sailor for over fifty-five years (rated among the top dozen ocean-racing yachtsmen of his time, he “collected a lot of silverware”), he spent time as the Commodore of the Cruising Club of America, and made his fortune co-founding a publishing company that put out Yachting Magazine (among other titles). So when his highly admired yacht, the Revonoc, disappeared in a freak squall on the short jaunt from the Florida Keys to Miami on January 1, 1958, it sparked a vast search and rescue operation that was covered in the national news. No sign of the yacht or its wreckage — other than its dinghy, which washed ashore — would ever be found. Because this was such a high-profile disappearance, Conover is able to quote from sources as varied as Sports Illustrated and the official Coast Guard reports (including the government’s official stance on the Bermuda Triangle itself: perfectly explainable factors can cause sudden storms), and I found everything about exploring the mysterious disappearance to be highly interesting.
What is an orphan’s story if she has no memory of her origins? Say the word aloud: or-phan. The mouth warms and wombs the first syllable, or, possessing it momentarily. Then, teeth against the bottom lip while squeezing the diaphragm hard. Phan. The word pushes into the surrounding emptiness, landing nowhere.
On a more personal level, Conover describes how she and her sister were adopted into her father’s sister’s family — a decision that would be challenged for years by her maternal grandmother — and the chaos that this unleashed in her aunt’s family. Despite genuine love and maternal concern from their adoptive mother (and from their new father, too, until that marriage dissolved under the strain), Sarah in particular felt like an orphan her entire life; and especially because her grandmother always insisted that she didn’t belong with the Conovers anymore. But through a love of nature, a spiritual embrace of Buddhism, and continuing education (that would lead to an MFA in Creative Writing), Conover was eventually able to make sense of her journey and find a way to “unstory” her life as an orphan.
We become the people we think we are — that’s why stories can be dangerous and even self-defeating. Other people can also become who we think they are and that’s why stories can be disastrous. We can’t help but use stories to connect, but beware, stories will use us. They did me, that is, until they didn’t.
Simply the perfect blend of interesting facts and heart-felt introspection; a novel could not do better at capturing what it means to be human.
