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.
Book Description
Embark on a thirteen-year journey through the stormy, madcap, on-again, off-again relationship between a Boston advertising art director (van Rooyen) and a Boston advertising film-director-turned-sailor ("The Captain").
Boat Bastard examines the torturous, slightly out of step mating dance that ensues between these two oversize personalities, complete with the requisite break-ups, reconciliations, and bloody bumps and bruises along the way. From Boston and Cape Cod to France, Israel, Jordan, and, finally, the Chesapeake, the Captain navigates this affair on his own terms, until one day, van Rooyen jumps ship.
With enormous wit and deadpan delivery, van Rooyen lays bare the very real experience of being the not-so-perfect woman trying to get it right with the almost-perfect man. In the end, she discovers that much as the Captain cannot seem to eke out much space for her within the confines of his boat, so too fares her claim on the affection within his heart. Van Rooyen finally emerges from the relationship with more than her share of sadness and regret, but also with the dignity that comes from having the strength to walk away.
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