This article first appeared in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette July 6, 2025

Fighting with your spouse? Perhaps they recently left a wet towel on the floor, or forgot to pick up the dry cleaning. Right, but have they ever sucked the juice out of a turtle eyeball?

The searing emotional pain of Sophie Elmhirst’s “Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck” puts small marital spats into perspective – and for good reason.

In June 1972 Maurice and Maralyn Bailey set off from the coast of England, dreaming of the freedom sailing would entail. Almost a year into their voyage, in the vast Pacific, a whale upends and violently sinks the boat.

“They thought of their boat as their child. To hear her wood tear and splinter was like hearing the pained scream of an infant,” Elmhirst writes in her nonfiction debut.

Elmhirst, an award-winning journalist, came across the story in the early days of the pandemic. Her just-the-facts ma’am style gives way to more complex, nuanced sentences. Ultimately, the book’s ebb and flow mimics the movement of the ocean on which the protagonists are trapped.

At sea on a raft for 118 days, this is a slow-burn love story in many ways. Elmhirst likens the book to a thought experiment, and any relationship taken to its ultimate extreme.

“Maurice and Maralyn had to square up to a truth we often avoid in our lives, which is the reality of our own mortality and that of those we love,” she said in a Q&A with the publisher.

Even though it’s clear what the book is about, the devil is in the details: watch as the couple learns how to catch sharks or use turtle carcasses for food, as Maralyn cheers on Maurice as he inches closer to death on the raft. There’s no doubt that Maralyn is the hero of the story. Her refusal to give up and give in drives the narrative.

To pass the time, the two played games with a piece of string. They talked about anything and everything, literally under the sun. Maralyn kept morale high by planning what their next boat would look like. They also made up games, making dominoes with paper from the logbook of the ship, or playing cards that were so thin that they could see each other’s hand.

That was before the prolonged exposure to the constant sun and salt and infection set in. Before all of the animals they had to kill just to survive. Then, when their raft became so half deflated they could no longer stretch out or get comfortable, every hour or every day became excruciating in some ways, but also happy in the quiet and calm of the sea.

Maralyn kept fastidious notes on everything from meals to state of mind (Maurice’s depression is evident). “The writing was the proof. The lists, the menus, and the clothes were reminders that such things still existed,” Elmhirst writes. “Solid things, on solid ground, that she could make with her own hands. She was still alive. Look, it said so on the page.”

Multiple ships passed them, just far away enough not to recognize that the object floating in the water was a raft, with living, breathing people. Sometimes the raft felt close to giving way, the most ominous fear.

Maurice and Maralyn discussed the possibility of having to eat the other if one died first. And a reader might think that the ultimate conclusion of this book is rescue or death (no spoilers here), yet with vigorous reportage, Elmhirst keeps the story going decades after the whale sinks the ship.

The suspense during “Marriage at Sea” is painful yet riveting. It’s a horror movie. The end can’t come fast enough, yet there is also no looking away. Although at its heart this book is about survival and love, it’s also a transcendent rumination on what marriages are, and should be.