Sailing at the Edge of Disaster: A Memoir of a Young Woman’s Daring Year is the story of how a bookish teen and her younger brother are sent by their dominating father to “shape up” on a sail training school ship, where they discover the rigors, joys, and triumphs of being at sea. As they scour the decks, learn to splice ratlines, and climb the rigging, they also survive an act of piracy, a near-sinking, and being held hostage by armed gun boats. The book chronicles a transformative year in the throes of late adolescence that leads to courage, grace, and a reclamation of selfhood.
Photo by Helen Garber
This book is for all lovers of the ocean. All sailors of the high seas. And want-to-be sailors. All the dreamers. It’s a beautiful, high-stakes coming of age tale about survival on an old square-sailed rigger that sets out across the sea. It’s also a vivid, stirring reminder that again and again the natural world will reduce us to our most elemental and allow us to finally see ourselves and know who we are.
In Sailing at the Edge of Disaster, Elizabeth Garber has an extraordinary tale to tell, one in which she is tested again and again by circumstances that would be unbelievable if they were not true. The aplomb with which she relates this strange, exhilarating ordeal testifies to a very special perseverance. To face such an experience from the perspective of decades is to chance an uncertain reckoning. The candor and wisdom that go with each word in this book speak to a hard-won grace.
I have spent the past few days devouring your work!! An honest to god page turner! Literally could not put it down! A stunning memoir of a young woman’s life changing year on a sailing ship Loss of innocence and newfound strength and self-knowledge is gained against harrowing dangers amidst a vivid cast of characters whose lifeworld is a ship at sea. A coming of age initiation tale, a true page-turner, a mashup of Outward Bound type adventure with echoes of Lord of the Flies and Ship of Fools.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In 1971 in a village in Ohio, Elizabeth Garber’s domineering dad announced he was sending his “problem children,” his seventeen-year-old bookish daughter, and her fourteen-year-old “paddled 50 times” brother, to a school on a sailing ship, to “shape up and learn to work.” Sailing at the Edge of Disaster: A Memoir of a Young Woman’s Daring Year, is the story of how Elizabeth joined fifty teen misfits: students kicked out of the best boarding schools, Mary Tyler Moore’s son Richie, Native American brothers and naïve Midwesterners who’d never seen the ocean, who were all sent to a decrepit yet once magnificent sailing yacht to learn to sail. They motored the limping ship out of Miami to begin the grand itinerary their charismatic, 25-year-old school directress envisioned. Instead, the ship encountered an act of piracy, a gale at sea, a hole in the hull in deep water, a near-miss with a nuclear sub, and ended up being held hostage by armed gun boats in Panama.
The heart of this coming-of-age story is how Elizabeth emerged from her emotionally battered teens and grew self-reliant and courageous with her foul-mouthed spunky best friend. By the time Elizabeth returned home, she’d gained the courage needed to stand up to her father and claim her own life.
READ AN EXCERPT
Read an excerpt of Sailing at the Edge of Disaster: A Memoir of a Young Woman’s Daring Year, published on Salon.com as the essay, “Drug search in the Panama Canal: How my high school adventure at sea almost ended.”
“Our safe departure for the canal depends on each of you,” the captain told our group of high schoolers in 1972.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth W. Garber is the author of Sailing at the Edge of Disaster: A Memoir of a Young Woman’s Daring Year which will be published September 2022 by Toad Hall Editions. She wrote Implosion: A Memoir of an Architect’s Daughter and three collections of poetry. She has maintained a private practice of acupuncture for nearly forty years in mid-coast Maine, where she raised her family.
Photo by Amy Wilton
AVAILABLE NOW
Implosion: Memoir of an Architect’s Daughter delves into the life of visionary architect, Woodie Garber, his adored daughter, Elizabeth, their family, and a mirror glass dormitory he designed for the University of Cincinnati campus. The family was caught in a collision of radical social change, modernism, and madness in the turbulent 1960s in Ohio. The tower dorm, known for out of control partying and an epidemic of arson, was only occupied for eleven years, and would be dynamited into rubble, the largest implosion in the US.
…poetic and incisive…Many readers will see aspects of their own family histories in this powerful saga of trauma and healing. An alternately wistful and searing exploration of a troubled legacy.
I was riveted by this story of an adoring daughter struggling to escape the dominance of her brilliant, charismatic father. Garber writes beautifully about the layered complications of family love.
Few books have narrated the personal dimension of modernism like this one. The contradictions that bedeviled modern architecture—a passionate yet impersonal elegance—were played out in a glass house dominated by Elizabeth Garber’s father, Woodie, a Midwestern modern architect extraordinaire.
Elizabeth Garber’s exquisite prose compliments the love of art and architecture that she learned from her father. Her forthrightness and honesty resemble the direct, unpainted and undecorated aesthetic that her father promoted, but her gentle sensitivity is all her own.
Implosion is a remarkable feat. […] As an architect does, Garber constructs her story room by room, filling the space with both shadow and light. This is a beautiful book, written by a new and exciting writer.
By reading Implosion, one not only gains access to the intimate, tragic details of Garber’s broken youth, but also to the public world outside her father’s realm: one of parallel turmoil, complexity, and yes: implosion. A finely wrought narrative by a brave, unflinching writer.
Courageous, horrible, terrible and wonderful, this is a dark and tragic beauty of a memoir that could only be written by someone determined to be fiercely honest in her remembering and her art.
Elizabeth Garber’s memoir drives as well as her Dad’s fine sports car. Sleek, modernist sentences, high-power clarity of perception, bold telling it like it was.
LATEST NEWS
“This elegant nautical memoir tells the story of a young woman’s courageous personal struggle for independence.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) To read the full review here.
Elizabeth Garber was interviewed by Rob Caldwell on Maine’s 207, Tuesday, Oct. 11, at 7:00 p.m. on WLBZ in Bangor and WCSH in Portland. Find the link here.
Watch Sailing at the Edge of Disaster book trailer, created by Camden, Maine filmmaker David Berez, to transport the viewer to a hippie school at sea in the 70s here.
Watch this compelling conversation between Elizabeth Garber and acclaimed author, Christina Baker Kline, at the Northeast Harbor Library on September 14, about her new memoir, Sailing at the Edge of Disaster, here.
Watch this lively book talk from Elizabeth Garber’s Book Launch, September 13, at Belfast Free Library, co-sponsored with Left Bank Books of Sailing at the Edge of Disaster: A Memoir of a Young Woman’s Daring Year here.
The Camden Opera House’s The Literary Salon on Sunday, Feb. 13, 2022, “Love, Belfast” by four past and current Belfast Poets Laureate. Elizabeth reads “A Love Story with Two Daughters” at :30 mins, view it here.
A Podcast from US Modernist Architecture, Sep 28, 2020, listen here.
Left Bank Books hosted the launch party of Implosion in 2018, read about it here.
Leslie A. Lindsey interviewed Elizabeth about her relationship with her architect father, Modern architecture, mental health, & how poetry shaped her as an author. Read the interview here.
Elizabeth Garber of Belfast, Maine reading her poem “It is Important to Forget” from her book, Listening Inside the Dance – A Life in Maine Infused with Tango for April Poetry Month, 2020. Watch here.
UPCOMING EVENTS
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