Boat Bastard: A Love/Hate Memoir - Hardcover

Van Rooyen, Deborah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060093544 ISBN 13: 9780060093549

Publisher: Regan Books, 2002

Synopsis

The author recounts her dysfunctional relationship with a man whose first love was the sea, describing their clashing personalities, disputes and reconcilations, and her eventual decision to end the affair.

About this title

About the Author:

Deborah van Rooyen is a writer and award winning creative director based in Boston, Massachusetts. Author of My Grandfather's Brother's Son, published in Israel, she is now working on a new book of memoirs, Jewish in Jordan: A View from the Other Side.

From Publishers Weekly:

The "boat bastard" in question is van Rooyen's lover, "Captain," a newly retired advertising film director with a 36-foot sailing sloop, although he could be any man with a "one-foot-in, one-foot-out" attitude to romance. The author, a creative director in Boston, fell in love with this Hemingway wannabe on a work assignment and spent the next 13 years trying to figure out what to do about him. Life on board ship is enormously frustrating for this otherwise capable woman "I grow stupid on the boat," she confesses, injuring herself constantly, losing verbal skills and losing her sense of self. Her man is so egotistical and emotionally unavailable that parallel troubles surface on shore, whether they're in Amman, Cape Cod, the Chesapeake Bay or France. The memoir's prologue prop a castrated voodoo doll reminds van Rooyen of her anger at the casual slights she's suffered; the retelling of her on-again, off-again romance reminds her of the love she still feels, long after she's jumped ship. Her confessional style is funny and self-deprecating, leaking enough about her own very checkered life (her teen years on a kibbutz, her rescue of her daughter from a kidnapping attempt by her ex, her project consulting to the queen of Jordan on a venture to market Palestinian women's handicrafts) to pique readers' interest and sympathy. Fans of NPR's Satellite Sisters program know the tune: "reader, I love him, but I wasn't getting anything back." Agent, Charles Bell Everitt.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Regan Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0060093544
• ISBN 13: 9780060093549
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272