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    Boat Girl: A Memoir of Youth, Love, & Fiberglass
    Boat Girl: A Memoir of Youth, Love, & Fiberglass
    Boat Girl: A Memoir of Youth, Love, & Fiberglass
    Ebook350 pages5 hours

    Boat Girl: A Memoir of Youth, Love, & Fiberglass

    By Melanie Neale

    4.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    “Boat Girl” is the heart-breaking memoir of what it’s like to grow up aboard a sailboat. Throughout the 1980’s and 90’s, Melanie’s family lived aboard a 47-foot sailboat, spending their summers along the US East Coast and their winters in the Bahamas. But the cruising life was not all fun in the sun. The family had to work hard to pay for their way of life. They dodged hurricanes, overzealous federal agents and bullying land-kids. And they endured a boatload of family drama. As her father published articles about how living on a boat brings families together, Melanie secretly struggled with an eating disorder, the alienation of being a boat kid, and confusion over her developing sexuality. As an adult, she lived aboard her own 28-foot sailboat and had several relationships trying to find someone who wasn’t intimidated by her stubborn independence and free-spirited lifestyle. “Boat Girl” weaves all this together into a story about a girl who, once all is said and done, simply wants her own boat and her own life.

    Melanie paints a vivid picture of the trials and tribulations of family life aboard a sailboat without drowning the reader in the technical details of sailing. “Boat Girl” strikes a perfect balance between a coming of age story and a sea tale, enjoyable for boaters and land-lovers alike.

    “Boat Girl captures the wonders and the paradoxes of growing up just offshore from American culture in a way that I haven’t ever seen in a lifetime of reading about such things.”
    - Tim Murphy, Editor-at-Large, Cruising World, Coauthor, Fundamentals of Marine Service Technology

    “An inspiring and beautifully written true story of a young woman schooled in the sea.”
    - Dan Wakefield, author of “New York in the Fifties”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBeating Windward Press
    Release dateSep 29, 2012
    ISBN9780983825234
    Boat Girl: A Memoir of Youth, Love, & Fiberglass
    Author

    Melanie Neale

    Melanie Neale, the author of Boat Girl: A Memoir of Youth, Love, and Fiberglass, grew up aboard a 47’ sailboat traveling the US East Coast and Bahamas. She earned a BFA in Creative Writing from Eckerd College in 2002 and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University in 2006. She has taught college, detailed boats, captained and crewed on boats, coordinated marketing events, and scooped minnows in a bait shop. Melanie currently works as the Director of Career Services for a private art college in northern Florida, where she lives with her husband and daughter. Melanie has been published in many literary journals and magazines, including Soundings, Seaworthy, Southwinds, GulfStream, Latitudes & Attitudes, The Miami Herald’s Tropical Life Magazine, Balancing the Tides, The Georgetown Review, RumBum.com and Florida Humanities. Her “Short Story” column appeared bimonthly in Cruising World Magazine from 2006 to 2009.

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    Reviews for Boat Girl

    4.5/5

    12 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This was a very interesting read for me. It gave me a real look at the kind of life I have no idea about: growing up on a boat, living on a boat year round for 20some years.

      The book was easy to read, the writing flowed well, and Melanie gave me a true and authentic look at her life. There wasn't any sugar coating. Good and bad memories were presented to show the full package.

      Super interesting read.
    • 5/5
      A fascinating account of Melanie Neale’s childhood and adolesence growing up on the family boat Chez Nous with her parents and younger sister. In the winters they head off for the Bahamas and summers they return to the east coast of the United States. Melanie’s parents have always been unconventional and wish to broaden the horizons of their children. Melanie and her sister are home-schooled and as children get shunned by small-town America for their unconventional lifestyle. Learning the lore of boat-life, Melanie makes life-long ‘liveaboard’ friends. At the age of eleven, she goes diving with her father and other men and has adventures with reef sharks and other formidable creatures. We share her growing pains as she turns from a child into a teenager and has various pubescent relationships. We feel her pain and confusion as she comes up against her father’s attitude as she becomes sexually active. The hypocrisy and double-standards she has to endure as a girl, hit her hard. Meanwhile, she and her friend, Michelle, have a dream to buy a boat and go sailing together when they are old enough and they save up to make this dream a reality. By the age of eighteen, Melanie is doing a correspondence course in boat design. She also gets her captain’s license and now has options and money in the bank. She and Michelle have saved enough for a boat but Michelle drops a bombshell – she’s going to get a boat with her new boyfriend. Not one to be perturbed, Melanie goes to college to study International Business and decides to major in creative writing. At the age of twenty-two she buys herself a boat Short Story and survives extreme weather conditions and hurricanes. She’s ‘chosen to be that girl who’s a little tougher than most guys’ after all. Boats are so much more than fibreglass when you’ve lived and breathed them and cared for them as Melanie has – they are her skin. The vivid imagery of reefs and conches and the passion with which Melanie describes her life as a ‘liveaboard’ will stay with me for a long time.
    • 5/5
      Getting a glimpse of a world I haven’t experienced is one of my greatest reading pleasures, and Melanie Neale writes with such beautiful, immersive language in this memoir of growing up as a “boat kid”, that it entranced me and gave me the liberating sensation that I was living it all myself, from the confined spaces of the cabin to the wide open vastness of the sea and sky. For her entire childhood, Melanie and her family lived on a 47 foot sailboat cruising between the Bahamas and the US East Coast. Through her I vicariously experienced swimming for fish in backwater bays, waking during a storm at sea when a wave of salt water sloshed over my bed, finding bullet holes on an isolated island abandoned by drug runners, and meeting geriatric nudists, one facet of the nomadic tribe that makes up small boat culture. Because of her family’s lifestyle Melanie became much more self sufficient than most land kids her age, able to dive for dinner and help repair a boat engine. She still had to cope with teenage image and identity issues and the big question of the book is what kind of life she will choose, boat or land, once she finishes her home school studies and has to make a decision about her future. Her father is pushing for college, but Melanie and a friend have been saving up to buy their own boat . . .
    • 3/5
      Melanie and her family lived aboard a sailing boat throughout the 80's and 90's. Their unorthodox lifestyle introduced Melanie and her sister to a variety of people, cultures and experiences. Determined to raise their girls away from the evils of society, the two children were home schooled. Their childhoods were filled with fun-in-the-sun, snorkeling, fishing and living on the ocean. As an adult, Melanie purchased her own boat and pursued a degree in creative writing.I have mixed feelings about this book. Her childhood was fascinating. However, the book showed very little dialogue or interaction with her parents and sister. I felt that she was leaving a lot of the story out. I thought the lack of bearings and constant drinking/partying of her adult hood was just said. I would have liked to have read more about her marriage and adaptation to "normal" life, but this was just dealt with in the epilogue. Overall, a good read, but it needed something more.

    Book preview

    Boat Girl - Melanie Neale

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