Set Adrift

What a journey through the deep mysteries of family, loss, love, and redemption! True to her inheritance, Conover pilots us through her lived experience with the intimate skill and authority of a seasoned sailor, even as she explores the terra incognita of unimaginable grief, confusion, and denial. Beautifully written, imbued with grace, and defined by hope and forgiveness, Set Adrift rocked me, wrecked me, and, finally, brought me home to safe harbor.
– Kim Barnes, Pulitzer finalist, author of In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country

Sarah Conover’s Set Adrift is a most captivating memoir. Written in brief, brilliant chapters, this gripping story unfolds elegantly. Though the book begins with a shocking maritime disaster, and returns with perfect pacing to the mystery itself, it’s a compassionate study in reclamation of facts, identities and relationships, extending for a lifetime. It’s a seeker’s journey through complexity, rich with family voices, scenes, devotions, and fresh reckonings. You’ll feel your own life and difficulties fall into relief as you read. I love this book with all my heart.
– Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People’s Poet Laureate (Poetry Foundation)

Raised by a family who imagined grief could be tamed the way (they trusted) their racing yachts would tame dangerous ocean currents, Sarah Conover shows resilience and courage as she pieces together the fragments of her broken life, undertaking a wide-ranging journey to discover what “home” might mean to the orphaned; what a restless spirit might indicate; and how deeply damaging entrenched family mythology can be. “This is not a memoir,” Conover writes, “this is the unwriting of fictions.” A triumph, exquisitely written and observed.
– Leslie Pietrzyk, author of Admit This to No One

Sarah Conover’s fearless path into the heart of the abyss and back again is uniquely transcendent. Who can fathom the depths of loss that consume us and make each human endeavor somehow akin to the infinite? Set Adrift speaks to the gravest losses with such familiarity, grace, intelligence, and hope, no page fails to leave an imprint of the ineffable. Read this book to revel in the human story, but remember Sarah’s final affirmation, in resonance with the heart of each individual, family, and community: “There is no true story. Only mercy.”
– Shann Ray, American Book Award winner, author of American Masculine and Atomic Theory 7

Not Set Adrift but swept away by Sarah Conover’s spellbinding memoir that charts the rending of a family forever haunted by the disappearance of the Revonoc, the yacht carrying the writer’s parents into the Bermuda Triangle’s Sargasso Sea, the only sea in the world without a coast. And so too the daughter’s terrestrial journey that takes her across the United States, has an element of open water and begs the timeless question of what family is, mother/father or other. In meticulous prose, Set Adrift speaks to our age of blended families and its Solomon-like custodial battles. The world is upside down, because just that fast, she partitions our world further. Conover’s storytelling is so compelling that once I finished reading its pages, I read it again. I predict an enthusiastic and enduring audience for this wise book.
– Stephanie Dickinson, author of Girl Behind the Door

If hope is the thing with feathers, as Emily Dickinson wrote, it is also the thing that sails on high seas. In the able hands of Sarah Conover, readers will sail away on a formidable January storm that took her elders, then back again to terra firm to salvage hope a family can heal from such a loss. This story of journeys, both geographical and emotional, will prove cleansing for anyone who has suffered from family dysfunction or tragedy. Number me among Sarah Conover’s fans.
– Paul Lindholdt, recipient of a Washington State Book Award for In Earshot of Water and author of Interrogating Travel (forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in 2023).