No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck
by Joan Wickersham
Forthcoming from EastOver Press, September 2024.
From the author of the National Book Award finalist The Suicide Index – hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “an extraordinary magical mystery tour of a book” – comes a startlingly original exploration of the unpredictability of fate and the mystery of our own mortality.
Cover photograph by Adam Davies
No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck is a poetic and philosophical meditation ignited by a beautiful, frightening, mysterious object: the seventeenth-century Swedish warship Vasa, which sank only minutes into its maiden voyage and lay forgotten underwater until it was found and raised more than three hundred years later.
“Even after reading Joan Wickersham's extraordinary work in the past, I was staggered by this book. I’ve never read anything like it. It’s miraculous, unique and profound.”
– André Gregory, co-author of My Dinner with André
“You may think you don't want to read a book about visiting a 17th-century shipwreck in a museum in Stockholm. That's exactly how Joan Wickersham felt about going to this museum in the first place. Then she became obsessed, and went back many times, and wrote this stunning book: about her own losses, about the reliquary impulse, about shipworms and skulls and widows, and no, you probably won't be able to read it just once. Maybe you have encountered something like this before but I have not.”
– Marion Winik, author of The Big Book of the Dead
Beginning with Joan Wickersham’s first sight of the ship in its Stockholm museum, her pieces – intimate, irreverent, urgent – weave together Vasa’s story and the associations it evokes. She addresses the shipbuilders, the divers and restorers, the men and women who drowned in the wreck and the objects they left behind: shoes and cooking pots, game boards and bones. She interrogates the wind that capsized the ship and the shipworms that failed to eat the wreck. Constantly rising up are the lingering echoes of her father’s suicide; memories of her mother’s final illness and death; and the paradoxical presence of the ship itself – an emblem of death and rebirth, a monumental failure whose flaws made it an enduring success, a vessel both destroyed and preserved by catastrophe.
No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck is a contemplative, strange, passionate, funny, and haunting book that both is and isn’t about the ship – a personal yet universal reckoning with mortality, and the question of what vanishes and what endures.
