I was expecting a nature memoir and instead got an incredible look at love, masculinity, and life. This is a really special and unique book. Recommended!

Sea State by Tabitha Lasley is incredibly well written and filled with information unknown to me previously. It is interesting to get further insight into the lives and minds of the men who work at the off-shore oil rigs. She tells about their state of mind, how torn they feel about what most describe as a double life. How they cope with their lifestyle and the sacrifices they had to give up. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys insight into the affects blue collar jobs have on employees. The dangers of rigging, the way the men interact with each other and their views on women and families. The affects on the children for having a father who works on an offshore rig and spends much of his time drinking, gambling and cheat on their wives.

Lasley's novel is modern prose at its best! Her work is a mix of memoir and nonfiction in sharp, sometimes gut-wrenching, detail. Written in six parts, the work explores Lasley's personal life as much as detailing the lives of oil riggers on the North Sea. Hard to put down, this is a not to miss, fine piece of contemporary writing.

I was initially afraid that this book would be too niche for me to appreciate, but Lasley’s wit and blunt storytelling kept me hooked till the end. Sea State is a memoir that feels more akin to having an intimate conversation on life with a friend over a couple pots of coffee.

Tabitha Lasley is a journalist in need of a fresh start. She leaves her life in London and makes her way to Aberdeen, Scotland in search of a story on the lifestyle of men on oil rigs. Men who go without seeing women, and the rest of the outside world for that matter, for weeks at a time. The more she learns about these men, the more she learns about herself as well.

Although her journalistic endeavors lead her through some pretty questionable decisions, I have to give her credit for owning her actions. If it weren’t for Lasley’s frankness, I’m not sure that I would have enjoyed this book as much as I did. But, because of her great storytelling ability, Sea State is engaging, evocative, and actually quite informative. Coming from an American gal with absolutely no prior knowledge on oil rigs, I was thoroughly hooked.

“Sea State” is a startling, memoir by local Londoner Tabitha Lasley. After a terrible car accident and a burglary that ended in the loss of her life’s work, Lasley makes the decision to break up with her boyfriend and move to Aberdeen, Scotland. Lasley hopes to fulfill her journalistic. She meets with 103 North Sea oil riggers, and strategically investigates their lives using the narrative of ‘friend’. Lasley soon falls for one of her interviewees, who happens to be married, and engages in a relationship with him.

This memoir is not like most memoirs I’ve read, for one, it expands only 6 months of Lasley’s life. It is an autobiography but is also a first-hand account of what men are like without women around. There are traces of education on the dangerous job of offshore drilling, but they are few and far between.

This memoir was definitely entertaining, so much so, that if I didn’t know better, I would think it was a fiction novel. I have the most respect for Lasley seeing how she put her whole life on hold to chase her dreams, even when her dreams require her to socialize with inebriated men in order to extract information from them. In a way, it’s true journalism! She is real and raw. She doesn’t hold back in her articulations, even when she’s talking about her own misgivings.

In my opinion, Lasley’s writing was hard to comprehend at times. As an American reader, I found some of the terms/slang uncompressible (for example, using the word ‘bird’ to mean women). I also became confused about what was happening in time, the transitions between past and present were slightly confusing and messy.

A great read for someone looking to read more about the sketchy investigative life of a journalist!

Having read this the same week I read GHOSTS by Dolly Alderton, I got a little spooked that my life as a thirtysomething singleton was irrevocably doomed? But that is not the book's fault. I thought this really was great in the parts where the author is not rutting a married guy. Some folks might find that the compelling part of the story? All this is to say that I hope this book becomes a big hit because I want to know more about the author's scrapped memoir TRAINERS FOR PROPER DANCING.