Sea State: SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE

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Here however I found the style to be quite personal and, for the most part, very compelling. I grew up reading women's magazines and newspaper columns written by or for women, and this seems very familiar. The closest comparison I can make is with Liz Jones, the Mail on Sunday's weekly columnist who journals her life through the prism of her relationship problems. The book is also fairly short - combined with the punchy style, it makes for an easy, satisfying read. In that sense, I think it's succesful -the tendency of the author to digress did get a bit much for me though. The vocabulary is also fairly complex and seems just a bit engineered to convey the impression that the author is very intelligent (as compared to the rough beasts on the rig, see below). I got through over half the book in a single sitting. Spoiler alert (Not): The affair ends predictably with the jilted author meandering aimlessly among the sailor town bars of Aberdeen collecting snippets of life on rigs based on interviews with men either on their way to the rigs or home, all of whom make pathetic attempts to bed her; evidently none has the charm of the married guy with eight tv’s in all the rooms of his house and a berating jealous wife. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. I know another writer, Owen, who is also an alumnus of the night-time economy. I ask if he ever took cocaine on the job. He took it on every job, he says. As a pot washer at a chain hotel. A barman at a Toby Carvery. A cashier at an all-night garage.

Lasley supposedly interviewed more than 100 men for this book, though you would hardly know that from reading it. That's because this book isn’t about masculinity and men, it’s about her and how she dealt with a failed relationship by dancing, drinking, doing drugsand occasionally listening to some men talk about their work in the most superficial of terms. Lasley is a good writer, which is perhaps why this bait-and-switch feels particularly frustrating. I am the manager, though this is an entirely theoretical distinction. I don’t earn any more than the kitchen staff. I have no authority. They hate me telling them what to do. At first, I put this down to my being a woman. As time goes on, I start to think that maybe they just hate me. It is an anti-authoritarian town. They are opposed to authority on principle. What have the authorities ever done for them? Taking a leap into the unknown, Lasley breaks up with her mean boyfriend and leaves her job to move to Aberdeen, Scotland, "the oil capital of Britain." There, she wants to research a book about the masculine, working class culture of oil riggers whose livelihood is threatened by, among other things, the influx of lower-wage workers from other parts of the world. one of the best I've read about men and women..." - the book does dwell on the subject of relations between the sexes. A lot of the observations, though, aren't examined further, especially in the light of class, which I'll explain next.Lasley has written a unique book, a cross between Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life: reportage on the English working class that is also a lucid travelogue." — BookForum Tabitha Lasley’s debut memoir, "Sea State" (Ecco, 240 pp., ★★ out of four), sells itself as a “study of love, masculinityand the cost of a profession that few outside of it can truly understand.” The author has said she wanted to write a book about what men are like with no women around. Because while this is a book about men who work "offshore", this is most definitely more a memoir about Lasley herself and her experiences interviewing these men, rather than educating the reader on the offshore drilling industry or what it's like to work on one. Lasley writes unapologetically, describing all of these things just as they are, no pussy-footing around. If she’s sympathetic to her subjects and the lives they’ve no choice but to lead – the deprivation in their post-industrial, mostly northern communities leaves them with no option but to take work offshore – she’s not about to patronise them by making excuses for their bad behaviour.

A candid examination of the life of North Sea oil riggers, and an explosive portrayal of masculinity, loneliness and female desire. What Lasley wants to know is what men, alone, do to one another, and how the ways that they are changed by what they do shape the way they relate to the women they meet on land. Through her interviews, she learns that the rigs are breeding grounds for “antifemale paranoia,” where men encourage one another to see women as sirens who cheat, or use pregnancies or divorces to gain money. (Around five per cent of riggers are women.) Lasley is repeatedly told that no man ever wants to get married, yet she is still surprised by the number who tell her about their affairs, which are explained as a way to “let off steam.” One man shows Lasley an ultrasound scan before hitting on her. Less surprising are those who are classically possessive, like the one who headbutts his iPad, while FaceTiming his girlfriend, because she is going out and he can do nothing about it. I’d like to say that I called my boyfriend and put our relationship out of its misery that instant. I didn’t. What I did do was make a private pact with myself, to stop lying. I would not marry him. I would not tie myself to him for the rest of my life, or even a small portion of it. That was the day I gave up pretending. And so it was that my mother had to walk my sister down the aisle. We huddled together in the porch, our breath coming out in pale plumes. The day was clear and very cold. The grass outside was tipped with frost. My sister was nervous, but the right kind of nervous – big-match butterflies rather than churning dread.The affair with Caden may consume most of the narrative of Sea State, but Lasley continues to work on the book that she set out to write, inducing riggers into conversation at hotel bars and strip clubs across Aberdeen. The memoir that she has actually published contains the ghostly imprint of this other book, the one that almost was. Anonymous quotes from Lasley’s interviewees appear at the start of each chapter. A few read almost like punchlines: Extremely dangerous conditions’: the Brent Delta platform in the North Sea. Photograph: Brian Jobson/Alamy These more sociological passages are interesting, but on the whole, Sea State’s slide into the personal doesn’t wind up feeling like a loss. Lasley’s writing is energetic and occasionally impressionistic. She is prone to self-indulgent disquisitions on the beauty of dance music like UK garage and seems nimbler with details than structures. All of this makes for a fresh and unpredictable prose style but would be an obvious liability in any bird’s-eye view of the oil industry. And perhaps most crucially, Lasley makes for as compelling a character as any of the men she speaks to. S ea State is so many things at once: an exploration of class, masculinity, desire, and the ways in which the work we do defines us. But alongside these huge subjects, it’s quite simply the story of a young woman who is lonely and finds herself in close proximity to a lot of lonely men. I was so impressed by how deftly Tabitha Lasley moves between the personal and the academic, and how much authority she maintains throughout. This is a truly powerful memoir.” — Mary Beth Keane, author of Ask Again, Yes If this makes her sound judgmental, well, she both is and isn’t. “I’m obsessed by class,” she says. “I wouldn’t claim to be working-class. I’m lower middle-class. I can write in a mannered middle-class style, but I’d rather go to the boxing than the theatre.” It pains her the way that parts of the country are seen by London, which in her eyes long since became another country in terms of its mores, and identity politics exasperate her. “Class analysis is left out, and in this country it’s so identifying. It’s so dishonest. I saw Rebecca Solnit [the American essayist] slagging off the marchers on the Capitol, talking about them as white men with all the power, imagining themselves as marginalised. I thought: grow up. They don’t have any power. They live in trailers… It’s so simplistic. The men in my book don’t have a choice. Do you think there’s a choice between living offshore for three weeks, and the dole?”