Sea State: SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE

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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. In recent years, there has been a constant flow of stories about the government’s plans to shame this sort of user into sobriety. Something will happen that indicates cocaine is now ubiquitous, commonplace. First come the findings: traces in the water; the Houses of Parliament swabs. Then come the winking editorials, the confessional features: My Secret Life as a Fancy Coke Addict. Then finally, the fulminating politicians. Daily, I drilled him on the worst-case scenario. Wipe your texts every time we talk. Leave your phone out where she can see it. No new clothes to go offshore, no smashing the gym before you leave. And if she does catch you, please don’t say it was just sex. But equally, don’t tell her I was special. She will ask if I’m prettier than her, if I’m younger than her, if I let you do the things to me she won’t let you do to her.

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 It takes you places so few books do’ Observer ‘Acidic, addictive reporting with a fictional veneer. After the meal, my mother stood up and gave a short speech. She touched on my father’s condition, the reasons for his absence. I stared into my glass and thought about my parents. My father wasn’t perfect, by any means, but he had been a good husband to my mum: decent, dependable, kind. Now, she had to keep up her end of the compact, the guarantee that underwrites every marriage. That was what partnership was. My father’s moods once had an almost mythic power. A lifelong hypochondriac, he never talked about his feelings but expressed them through a range of psychosomatic symptoms. He especially hated our mother going out without him, and would get crippling stomach cramps in the hours before her departure.

The focus of the book therefore is more about the life of the author, and her attempts to discover what working offshore is like, than the actual experience of the workers themselves. There are books considered classics that follow a similar journalistic experiment. More or less every Hunter S. Thompson book, for example, is constructed in this way. It is very funny, sardonic even. Lasley is always the cleverest person in the room, she doesn't tell us this, it is patent. At the outset, we are told that the book was planned to be about men without women. We see this in a way that scratches the surface. It the way that they won't let a 'lass' buy a drink, that they pile into the rec room when a girl is wearing hot pants, that they can't talk to an attractive woman without trying to pull her. It is however only men with a herd mentality, only the 'Boro' lads on tour'; occasionally there are moments when there are break throughs in the interviews and a moment of crystal clarity presents itself but only in these isolated moments do we see how men are away from each other. A Recommended Read from: Vogue * USA Today * The Los Angeles Times * Publishers Weekly * The Week * Alma * Lit Hub

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. 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.Smart about sexual desire and the ease of analyzing — but the difficulty of escaping — familiar gender roles, Sea State offers a close up view of the white, working-class resentments that helped fuel both Brexit and the Trump presidency. As a journalist, Lasley commits the cardinal sin of getting involved with one of her subjects; but as memoirist, her transgression saves Sea State from the tone of faintly anthropological distance that books about the working class often have. 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?”