Tell us about Maurice and Maralyn Bailey and how their love story turned into one of the most dramatic adventures ever recorded. How did you originally come across it?

I came across Maurice and Maralyn’s story during the pandemic while I was researching an article about people trying to escape, perhaps for obvious reasons. Among the stories, mostly of lone men surviving at sea, a black and white photograph of a man and a woman caught my eye. When I learned this was a married couple who had spent nearly four months adrift together on a raft in the middle of the Pacific, I was hooked. It wasn't just the extremity of their experience that captured my attention, but its intimacy. It seemed improbable that they'd survived such an event physically, but I was just as intrigued as to how they'd survived it psychologically and emotionally - not least how their marriage had survived. 

Maurice and Maralyn had set off in 1973 to sail around the world. After being shipwrecked, they spent four months eating raw turtle, sharks, fish and birds, learning how to dissect and swallow raw flesh, to suck the juice out of turtle eyeballs, going to the toilet in a biscuit tin, becoming desperately ill, bored out of their minds, and nearly dying. Somehow they kept each other alive - but how? This was the mystery I wanted to solve, and the story I wanted to tell. 

Adrift at sea for 118 days, Maurice and Maralyn found themselves pushed to both physical and psychological extremes. What do you imagine was the greatest challenge of all these elements?

Without a doubt, their greatest struggles were mental. Once they had figured out the basics of survival, their systems for eating and drinking and sleeping - though imperfect and uncomfortable - the challenge was how to keep themselves hopeful, purposeful and occupied. As much as this is a story of great drama - a shipwreck, storms, near-death, an unlikely rescue - it is also a story of how to survive in nothingness. When it’s calm, the middle of the ocean can feel like a desert. Nothing moves, nothing happens. For weeks at a time they saw no sign of human existence. Their refusal – Maralyn’s refusal – to succumb to despair in these moments is a testament to her resourcefulness and resilience, but also reveals a deeper truth, that survival requires not just pragmatism, but a belief in the possibility of survival. 

A Marriage at Sea a combines a dramatic, adrenalized narrative with a deeply intimate story of one couple’s marriage. Tell us more about their dynamic.

Their dynamic was established long before their voyage. Maurice had had a difficult childhood, lacking in affection. By the time he met Maralyn in his late twenties, he was beset by self-doubt and lived a lonely, frustrated existence in the English town of Derby. Maralyn was younger, lively and confident. This imbalance continued through their lives. Adrift on the ocean, she thought positively and pragmatically, while he turned on himself, desolate and self-punishing. Maralyn had the power in their relationship, and used that power to hold him up, to such an extent that without her, he struggled to know the point of his existence at all. 

The book grapples with themes of isolation, depression, and grief, yet hope ultimately moves the Baileys’ forward. What attracted you to write about hope in this way?

It's funny: a lot of people have asked me who I relate to more, Maurice or Maralyn. I wish I could say Maralyn. In fact, I share some of Maurice's most self-defeating tendencies, namely the inclination to doubt oneself, to detect internal failings, even to give up entirely. Maralyn was my education: here was another way to be. She is alien to almost all my instincts and yet offers a necessary correction. What if you privilege hope: what if you put trust in it? What if you let it guide your choices and dictate your actions? It is radical, in its way. Don't get me wrong, sometimes the militancy of her hope feels close to delusion, an act of willful imagination. And yet, in this case, it worked. It kept them alive. It couldn't keep them alive forever - nothing can do that - and that's why it was important for me to write the end of their lives too, and the long period of grief and isolation that Maurice suffered after Maralyn's death. This isn't a fairytale, after all; they were always mortal. But her spirit and her hope worked on him and helped him over a lifetime, I think, even in grief. And it left him with the richest legacy of all, which was her love.

You explore what it means to seek solitude with another person, the challenges of relationships, the psychology of survival, and so much more. How is this a book about both human connection and the human condition?

Maurice and Maralyn’s time on the raft was almost like a thought experiment; the reality of any relationship taken to its ultimate extreme. After all, all relationships suffer tests. All couples have to face the worst at some point, and look to the other to see what they will find. Maurice and Maralyn had to square up to a truth we often avoid in our lives, which is the reality of our own mortality and that of those we love. Their experience offered a way of delving into the fundamentals of life and how we live it, its brevity and fragility, and how the presence of someone else – human connection – is often what guides us through.