Allegra Goodman: Hello Sophie! I wanted to start by saying how much I enjoyed A Marriage at Sea. What a harrowing survival story! It’s amazing that Maralyn and Maurice survived being stranded at sea for all those months — and that their marriage survived as well. At the beginning of the book you write about this couple’s desire to sail freely on open water, and how they cherish their days alone together in their boat under the stars. But when that boat is struck by a breaching whale and sinks into the Pacific, they must live on their life raft, and the solitude and natural splendor that dazzled before now tests them severely. What was it like to write about this shift in circumstances? Do you think this is a story of disillusionment? Or acceptance? Or both?

Sophie Elmhurst: I guess I think it’s both — which is the easy answer, perhaps, but also true to their different reactions. When their boat sinks, despair and disillusionment send Maurice, at least at first, into a state of dangerous passivity. He contemplates how they might kill themselves. But Maralyn gets to work. Her acceptance and refusal to submit to despair is what keeps them alive. But it’s also a practical response. Acceptance means adjustment. She organizes their belongings, writes an inventory of what they have on the raft, and works out precise rations to make their salvaged tins of food last as long as possible. So I suppose ultimately it’s a story of how, in the right company, despair can be translated into action.

I’m not sure he could have done it alone, the way your stranded Marguerite does in Isola.

Initially Marguerite is marooned with her lover Auguste and her nurse Damienne. But when they die she is left entirely alone and must decide whether to keep going or give up. Marguerite finds that strength, but Maurice never quite recovers from his grief.

Even so, I saw such a synchrony between their stories here. I report on how Maralyn and Maurice stay busy on their raft to keep their spirits up, and how procuring food helped fend off despair. Of course I had source material to work with, but you had to invent all these ingenious methods of how Marguerite could stay alive — I’m fascinated to know what you drew on to tell this part of the story.

AG: I see that synchronicity as well! Though my book is a novel, it is inspired by real events. The real Marguerite did not write a memoir or leave a diary, but she was famous in her day as a survivor. There are two contemporary accounts of her ordeal – though each is just a couple of pages long and neither provides much detail about how she survived day to day. But I did learn that she had muskets, arquebuses, and powder and that she fought off polar bears!  In the absence of substantive archival material, I researched the climate, flora, and fauna of the islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence off the coast of Quebec where she was stranded, and concluded that eating birds and their eggs would have been her best bet for food. I also thought a lot about how she would have stayed warm. The climate is sub-arctic there, and I know that in the 16th century it was even colder than it is now because this was the period known as the Little Ice Age.

In your book, your powerful accounts of fishing and eating turtles really stayed with me. Do you think that Maralyn and Maurice changed their attitude toward animals while they were shipwrecked?

SE: Yes, absolutely. I was recalling those moments as I read your scenes of Marguerite cutting up the dead bear — how she has to overcome her initial horror. I think when you’re really up against the possibility of death in such conditions, any idealism or sentimentality you have around animals or the natural world simply recedes. Maralyn and Maurice initially set off with an attitude of wonder and reverence for nature — Maurice especially deplored the damage that humans unleash on the natural world — and yet they end up having to destroy and consume any creature that strayed near their raft in order to survive. Reading Isola I was so interested in how a similar progression happens, and wondered what you thought about that shift, from nature being something we think of as beautiful or passive to be admired, to becoming a set of creatures and circumstances that must be harnessed for our own survival . . . .  There is something brutal and deeply unsentimental about it, and yet truthful I suspect.

I think when you’re really up against the possibility of death in such conditions, any idealism or sentimentality you have around animals or the natural world simply recedes.

AG: There’s a humbling that occurs when a person is cast away or shipwrecked. Marguerite, like Maurice and Maralyn, discovers that she is now truly part of nature — not just observing the view but really IN IT. She is an animal who must find a way to stay warm and eat. When she battles her first polar bear she is horrified and angry. When she fights the second, she feels almost like a bear herself. She reflects at one point that the bear does not hunt for sport but from necessity, and of course she does too. She thinks winter is a duel. Like the other creatures on and off her island, she must try to survive the season.

In your book you capture a certain romance about the sea that Maurice and Maralyn maintain when they set out. What struck me as fascinating is that after their rescue they do not entirely give up that romance. They want to sail again. How do you think they maintained their love of the ocean and resisted giving into fear?

SE: The idea of returning to sailing came to Maralyn while they were adrift. It was a way of imagining a future, which was a way of keeping Maurice going. If she could lock his mind into the possibility of fresh adventure, it was less likely to turn on itself. So they spent a lot of time on the raft designing their next boat and plotting their voyage (as well as coming up with fantastical menus for dinner parties and picnics). Maurice was surprised. He presumed Maralyn would never want to sail again after this debacle. But I think her response and her desire showed what kind of woman she was, and the degree to which she insisted on looking forward and believing in what was to come.

There was a moment in your book that again reminded me of their experience — which comes when Marguerite finally sails away from the island having been rescued. I detected a feeling there that was definitely present in Maurice and Maralyn’s reaction to rescue, which is that while they were relieved and happy to be safe and to escape the torment of their time on the raft, there was also a kind of ambivalence. There had been something almost wonderful about their experience, that proximity to the ocean, the ultimate seclusion. For Marguerite, I guess it was a little different in that her departure is also a farewell to the people she loved and lost on the island. But I was interested in what you thought about those feelings of ambivalence, about how an experience we would assume would be traumatic can in memory become something more sentimental.

Bring home Isola and A Marriage at Sea today!

AG: It’s so interesting! Marguerite recognizes that even when she is fighting to survive, when she is humbled by the natural world, she is also free in a way she cannot be as a woman back home in France. Her experience on the island breaks her but also remakes her. She learns how to live, and her teacher is the natural world – the ocean, the wind, the cold. When she returns to her modern world she sees everything with new eyes. She who had never done anything for herself, now knows what work is. She who lived with servants in her old life now knows how to take care of herself. It was amazing to write about that transformation. She also becomes a celebrity with accounts of her ordeal circulating at court. In your book Maurice and Maralyn become celebrities as well. You suggest that they suffered a bit from that attention. Do you think they felt the irony that their voyage away from modern life brought the world crashing down on them?

SE: Yes, I think it was so extreme. Total isolation on the Pacific Ocean for nearly four months to the world’s press waiting to meet them in Hawaii. Just like Marguerite hearing the Queen’s version of her story, Maurice couldn’t help but bridle at the inaccuracies in the journalists’ questions, or the assumptions they made about what had happened. Not least the implication that he, the man, had led them to safety, when of course it was Maralyn who captained throughout the crisis. Again, there’s a link here — what you said about Marguerite being afforded freedoms on the island that she never had in her life in France, this was true for Maralyn as well even though we’re five centuries into the future. She was given a power in her marriage that was quite atypical for the time. This point about freedom I think is so central to both these stories, and it’s not as clearcut as we think, perhaps. Maurice and Maralyn sought freedom by leaving England and found themselves trapped in isolation, but that isolation in its own way became a kind of freedom! Do you find some of the same contradictions in Marguerite’s story?

Her experience on the island breaks her but also remakes her. She learns how to live, and her teacher is the natural world – the ocean, the wind, the cold.

AG: Absolutely. Marguerite and her lover reflect that they are the rulers of their island but they are their own subjects too. That they are prisoners and yet they are free to live as they choose. They call their paradox a riddle. I loved writing about it. I can tell that you loved writing about this irony as well. When you wrote A Marriage at Sea did you find yourself identifying with Maralyn and Maurice? Did you feel you were living this ordeal with them?

SE: Ha, I found myself, unfortunately, identifying quite strongly with Maurice! If only I were a Maralyn. But I suspect I would react not dissimilarly to Maurice and quite quickly lose a grip on reality and/or hope. It frightened me, if I’m honest, how their story revealed the extent to which a psychological attitude can shape the course of events, and can literally ensure survival. Despair and surrender can be the quickest route to death. Maralyn’s optimism was a sort of superpower, but one I found quite alienating.

What about you? You were having to imagine so much more than I was, I suspect you had to somehow transplant yourself there to really see and feel it. I’d love to know what that felt like.

AG: I guess it’s a paradox, like a shipwreck. When you’re a novelist with not much documentation to go on you are limited by sources but free to imagine a great deal. The challenge is also an opportunity. I did have to imagine my way into Marguerite’s experience and try to feel as she did. Writing her story I experienced her despair and doubt and anger and also her spiritual yearning — but all in character — not as I would, but as she would have. She is not a 21st century feminist and does not live in our very secular world. Her resilience has a religious framework because her education was religious. It was important to me to write about her transformation in the context of her world and experience, not ours. That said, my book is about a woman who survives and becomes the hero of her life. I felt while reading your book that Maralyn was the hero. Do you agree?

SE: I do, undoubtedly. And yet my sympathies somehow always remain with Maurice, as difficult a man as he was. I came to think of the story as one of two shipwrecks: the literal one, and the one that occurs much later in life, when Maralyn dies and Maurice is left alone and in deep grief. In a way, this second shipwreck is far more damaging for him for the obvious reason that he doesn’t have Maralyn to rescue him. Something I found deeply moving, however, was how in later life he came to see their time adrift. He told an interviewer that he would do it all again, if he knew he was going to survive — that there was something extraordinary about being that close to nature, close enough to look into the eye of a whale. I wonder if you ever thought about how Marguerite might look back on her experience?

AG: I thought that section of your book was so poignant, when Maurice was bereaved and thought he would have gone back. Marguerite did not choose her adventure, and yet, I think she might look back on her experience and recognize it was the making of her. Like Maurice she might have thought what a miracle it was to live so close to nature. To see an arctic fox, to hunt, to watch the waves turning into ice. She recognizes the beauty as well as the terror of her experience on the island.