All at Sea

Starred review from May 16, 2016
While on a relaxing family beach vacation in Jamaica, Guardian journalist Aitkenhead
watched helplessly as her husband, Tony, drowns after rescuing their four-year-old son. Her remarkable memoir recounts the emotional toll his death takes on her and her two sons. The narrative explores how the foggy lens of truth, through which she, as a journalist, previously viewed tragedy, can shatter when tragedy hits home. Aitkenhead and Tony made for an unlikely pair. She covered the political beat for the Guardian while he dealt drugs and smoked crack, with violence part of his life. Yet the couple fell in love and had two sons together, and Tony became a model husband and father. Aitkenhead probes her own psyche to explore the numerous incongruities in her life that surface during her relationship with Tony. She looks at the serious depression that arose in her family when her mother died. Aitkenhead’s tightly written memoir looks beyond commonly held truths, taking readers deep into the morass of human emotion and leaving them gasping for air. Agent: Natasha Fairweather, United Agents.

June 1, 2016
An award-winning journalist's account of how she came to terms with the accidental drowning death of her beloved companion and father of her two children. When Aitkenhead met Tony, she was a successful writer for the Guardian who had grown up with two bohemian parents. He was a charming mixed-race crack addict who "wholesaled cocaine for a living" and smelled of "designer cologne and cannabis." Both were married, but in time, they developed a powerful attraction to each other and left their respective spouses to become "the most implausible couple I had ever known." Their challenging but ultimately happy union came to a tragic end 10 years later on a beach in Jamaica where Tony died trying to save their small son from drowning. Aitkenhead remembers her partner--who defied all stereotypes of a street-hustling gangster--with deep affection. "Although a criminal, he was trustworthy and surprisingly guileless," she writes, and had a "deep hippy streak" that manifested in a love of camping, cooking, and children. A few years into their relationship, the author discovered that she was pregnant and left Tony out of fear for what his crack habit would do to their child. Unwilling to lose her, Tony immediately joined a Cocaine Anonymous group and ended all crack use. He embraced his role as father and later as a charity worker who helped "desperately dispossessed children" from dysfunctional households. With Aitkenhead's encouragement, Tony went to college and earned a degree in psychology and criminology. That she and her partner were able to learn from each other and work through their race and class differences to form a cohesive family unit makes the book memorable. But in the end, it is the author's resilience after her lover's death--which she describes with poised eloquence--that renders the narrative especially satisfying. An unsentimental yet affecting memoir.

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July 1, 2016
British journalist Aitkenhead's tragic memoir hinges on the death of her partner, who drowned while saving their young son. The author brought the boy in, convinced that his father was right behind them. Her shock at his death, that a sweet family vacation could end in such devastation, is palpable in every word. It is this raw, unremitting emotion that grounds the book and makes it compelling on a nearly visceral level. Aitkenhead pulls back from the first chapter's pain and takes readers into the story of how she met this man years earlier, how they fell in love while both were married and while she was building an award-winning career and he was an active drug-user and dealer. Candidly, she shares her family's horror at the match, her own confusion over their strong attraction, and the wholly unexpected way in which they managed to not only stay together but thrive, ultimately having two children. While her grief is nearly incapacitating, readers will appreciate the frank manner in which she shares it. Intense and surprising from start to finish.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)