Lit Up: Our Wives Under the Sea

Lit Up is a series in which I discuss my recent reads from a craft perspective. These are neither reviews nor critiques; they’re focused on exploring what worked for me, why, and how. As such, this post is rife with spoilers and assumes you’ve already read the text.

Our Wives Under the Sea is a story of love:

I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes. It’s nearly impossible, at least in my experience, to listen to someone telling a story about their partner and not wish they’d get to the point a little faster: OK, so, you’re saying he likes long walks, you’re saying she’s a Capricorn, skip to the end. It’s easy to understand why someone might love a person but far more difficult to push yourself down into that understanding, to pull it up to your chin like bedclothes and feel it settling around you as something true.

But more than that, it’s a story of loss:

I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.

The story follows Miri, in the present day, caring for her wife Leah, who came back from a disastrous submarine mission far later than planned and… not herself. Not much of anyone, really. Distant, unfocused, nearly unrecognizable, with strange physical symptoms that defy explanation.

The story also follows Leah’s experience of the doomed mission as she and her crew mates, Jelka and Matteo, try to figure out what went wrong, why they’re trapped in the dark at the bottom of the ocean, and how they’re going to get home again.

It cuts back and forth between Miri in the present and Leah in the past; between sweetly powerful memories of these two women building their relationship and the present-day distance between them, the unanswerable questions, the desperate desire for things to go back to the way they used to be.

This happened once, a long time ago: Leah and I on an early date and a man in between us at the bar, forcing a leg between our stools with the forward- thrusting motion of someone preventing an elevator door from closing. Are you sisters, he had said, and she told him yes and then kissed my open mouth.

Miri struggles with missing “her” Leah while caring for this new, withdrawn Leah in her strange, distant, obviously unhealthy condition. And she gives so much care, even as Leah seems ignorant of her, seems to only want to spend all her time in the bath, seems to be literally disintegrating into seawater.

How do you keep loving someone when they’re no longer the person you knew?

There is something, the therapist says, to be said for letting go of anger. There is something, I tell her in a voice she immediately terms unproductive, to be said for not staying away six months when your operation terms stipulated only three weeks.

Everything outside of their relationship is strikingly vague. We don’t learn much about Leah’s employer, the dive objectives, or what they found at the bottom of the sea. The mission itself is rendered mostly as snapshots of Leah’s relationships with her crew mates; we never learn what actually went wrong with the sub, or why it suddenly started working again. In the present day, we see lots of strange symptoms of Leah’s affliction, but they never resolve into a concrete diagnosis.

This would all feel—at times, does feel—like the wandering, make-it-up-as-you-go-along mystery of Lost but for the fact that this story isn’t a sci-fi mystery, but a long-form meditation on grief.

Miri, late in the story:

All you want to do in response to grief is talk about it but all everyone assumes you want to do is talk about anything else.

And so the story spends a lot of its time talking about anything else. And that gives it a certain wandering, unfocused quality.

But grief does that: it gives you tunnel vision beyond which everything goes out of focus, almost fading away entirely. The story’s sharp focus on Miri, Leah, and their relationship contrasts with the disarming fuzziness of everything else in the same way the pain of grief blurs the rest of one’s experience. The story, like Miri, keeps trying to talk about anything but the grief, while the grief stubbornly remains the only thing we can actually see.

I was, at first, shocked that Jelka’s sister Juna contacted Miri so late; it felt like we were finally starting the “figure out what’s going on” story, but it’s two-thirds of the way through the book: we should be entering the climax, not just getting started.

Juna’s late arrival makes sense, though, because this isn’t a story about figuring out what happened to Leah: it’s a story about accepting what happened to Leah. And Miri, at this point, is starting to realize this:

I take my laptop to the sofa and open up the website for people whose loved ones have disappeared. I scroll through the message boards for several seconds, taking in the surprising number of new posts that have sprung up since I last logged on. Problem is, I read, that ultimately you’re really the one who has to kill them. Or not them but the idea of them— you have to make a choice to let it end.

This also foreshadows the ending quite nicely, helped along by this recollection by Miri of something Leah once told her:

“Did you know,” she says at one point—the dreaming lecture-voice that tells me she has, for the moment, forgotten me—“did you know that we all carry the ocean in our bodies, just a little bit? Blood is basically made up of sodium, potassium, calcium—more or less the same as seawater, when you really get down to it. The first things came from the sea, of course, so there’s always going to be a little trace of it in everything, a little trace of salt in the bones.”

By the time Miri gives Leah back to the sea, there is no other way the story could end.

Craft takeaways:

• Embedding the story’s theme in its structure is an impressive literary move.
• You can actually get away with extreme vagueness about a lot of things if you have a very good reason for it.
• The contrast between love and loss makes a much more powerful story than if it had been about loss alone; the darkness is better understood in relation to the light.