A Process Not Without Casualty: Amity Gaige in Conversation with Susan Choi

When I received my advance copy of Amity Gaige’s new novel, Sea Wife, something immediately warned me to clear the decks—well, the day’s calendar—before I started it. I don’t know if it was the luminous Caribbean blue of the cover—the color of seductive water concealing great peril—or if it was the charged, terse title, or if it was Gaige’s well-earned reputation as the author of masterful and spellbinding novels, but I knew I was going to read this book straight through and snarl at anyone who tried to interrupt me.

I was right. To say I was dazzled by Sea Wife would be an understatement.  I was so captivated I sometimes had to remind myself to breathe while I was reading.  As a reader, I devoured the book—even thinking, in the last 40 pages or so, Slow down and save some for later—but I didn’t.  As a writer, I was envious. Wow, I thought, how did Amity Gaige learn to sail the high seas/write both beautiful poetry and beautiful poetry criticism/get so far inside the head of a Trump voter that he becomes deeply sympathetic?

Recently I got the chance to ask. Gaige and I floated the following questions and answers back and forth between the islands of our separate quarantines in Brooklyn.

Susan Choi: Maybe, start with how you achieved such authority in terms of sailing that it seems as though you literally wrote this book while circumnavigating the globe in a sailboat?

First of all, this praise makes me need to pinch myself. Susan, thinks these things about my book? Your book made envious, so we’re even.