Author Sarah Conover lives part-time near Winthrop.
Conover’s “Set Adrift: A Mystery and a Memoir” is indeed both
By Sandra Strieby
Sarah Conover’s parents and grandparents were lost at sea during a freak storm when Conover was a toddler. The two couples and a family friend were sailing through the Bermuda Triangle when an unexpected gale roiled the waters southeast of Miami. Their boat was not recovered, leaving Conover’s family suspended in a state of grief and loss.
Conover’s recent book, “Set Adrift: A Mystery and a Memoir,” tells the story of the storm and of Conover’s own life in the aftermath of a loss that overwhelmed her whole family.
Conover says she wrote the book because “it was a story that needed telling.” It’s a gripping tale set in motion by her grandfather, Harvey Conover Sr., a successful businessman, irrepressible adventurer, and founder of a lively sailing family — the story of a winter cruise gone tragically awry.
It’s also a tale of self-discovery, of a search for belonging and a coming to terms with reality that emerged through Conover’s years spent unearthing the story and putting it into words.
The senior Conover’s prominence in the glamorous worlds of yachting and publishing, coupled with the aura of mystery surrounding the Bermuda Triangle, kept the disappearance of the cruising yawl Revonoc in the news as the search for the boat and its skipper and passengers extended to days and then weeks. Behind the scenes, another story was being written, that of two orphaned girls and the conflicting claims of relatives with interests of their own.
As children, Sarah and her older sister Aileen lived with their father’s sister Fran and her family, while making regular weekend visits to their maternal grandmother, who had moved from California to the east coast to be close to the girls — and seek custody of them. Silence within the Conover family and her grandmother’s quest to control the story worked with the loss itself to leave Conover adrift in her own life, unmoored and searching.
No memorial service was held until decades after the tragedy. Along with all that was left unsaid, the lack of closure kept the tragedy alive. “… the Revonoc continued to haunt us, each person the accident’s unique heir, each life folded into a mangled trajectory, the immediate pain subsumed only to reemerge again and again unexpectedly, compounded and convoluted,” wrote Conover in “Set Adrift.”
Escape from the doldrums
As an adult, Conover pieced together her own story by interviewing relatives, reading articles and letters, and looking at photos and home movies. At the same time, she was learning to manage her own mind.
“I was born with a lot of energy and I think I was running from the grief for many decades,” she said. Learning to meditate helped her recognize unhelpful patterns and use her life energy effectively.
Following several moves, Conover and her husband settled in his hometown of Spokane, where they developed their careers, raised their children, and enjoyed the outdoors. Conover earned an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University and, among other pursuits, taught creative writing through the Spokane Community Colleges. She continued to grapple with her history, ultimately recognizing writing as a means of healing.
“Fundamental to the nature of trauma is the lack of story and specific memory,” wrote the author in “Set Adrift.” In an interview, she credited the process of writing memoir with mediating her own traumatic loss, and suggested it can do the same for others.
“I think writing has a special way of accessing loss,” she said. In her own experience, writing has given Conover an entrée to feelings of which she’d been unaware, and she’s found the same to be true for her students. “Things arise in writing that you don’t have access to, necessarily, otherwise.”
Claiming and releasing
“Set Adrift” is Conover’s seventh book, and the most personal. Acknowledging that discovering, writing, and ultimately making public her story required a willingness to be vulnerable, Conover also put that vulnerability in context, tying it to the grief that underlies her chronicle.
“We are a grief-illiterate society still. And … grief doesn’t necessarily have to be just sadness. It’s a beautiful thread in our lives. and that’s what ties us together as human beings. … So, that kind of vulnerability, I think, is important,” she said.
The product of Conover’s willingness to face her past may help unravel our communal grief illiteracy. In spite of its challenging theme, “Set Adrift” is a compelling narrative that gradually unveils stories and the ambiguities that surround them.
The book also reveals some of Conover’s own attitude toward story. Drawing on decades spent studying and practicing Buddhist philosophy, Conover has recognized the necessity of releasing stories in order to free herself to live, and allow herself to belong, in present time.
“I think Buddhism is for me about unstorying the ways we burden ourselves with identity, and lose our freedom,” she said. Writing memoir may be a first step toward release. “I think you have to claim your story first, and also, we don’t know what stories have already claimed us, often, until [we] start writing,” she said.
Learning from loss
“The book parallels and mimics how I had to put the story together,” Conover said. Short chapters reveal individual elements of the story and varied points of view. The chapter titles “Orphan” and “Hold Still” repeat throughout the book as the author gradually comes to terms with what it means to be an orphan, and slowly learns to be still. The process began to reveal Conover’s story as a product of her own mind, a reflection of her perspective rather than the whole picture.
“The more I hold still, the more the machinations of my mind expose themselves,” wrote Conover in “Set Adrift.” A few paragraphs later: “I am beginning to recognize that my ‘self’ might be a perpetually recreated story, and that Sarah might be the chief fictional character of that story.”
In learning from others’ experiences, “You start seeing that you have one little part” of the story, said Conover. “No event can be flattened out to a single narrative … [S]ometimes unstorying means complicating … your single narrative … with others so that you see how many things came together, and how many ways there were to experience something.”
“Big tragedies like this blow families apart,” said Conover. “One of the things I want people to take away from the book is … let’s not let that happen.”
“Grief,” she said, “is a constellation of emotions, everything from numbness to anger to sadness.” Handled well, it is “a beautiful path to the heart. … If [you] wallow in it too long you have diminishing returns, but then you can use it as sort of a touchstone for compassion, and that’s what it has been for me.”
Conover lives part-time near Winthrop. She has offered memoir-writing workshops in the Methow Valley, and will do so again this fall — see the sidebar for more information. Her book has caught the attention of the History Channel, and she said plans are underway to search for the Revonoc. The story is expected to air in December as part of the channel’s second series on the Bermuda Triangle.
Set Adrift is available at Trail’s End Bookstore and the Cascades Outdoor Store.
Memoir writing workshops with Sarah Conover
Sarah Conover will offer writing workshops in the community room at the Winthrop library this fall:
• “Bittersweet: Finding the Language for Love and Loss,” a single session on Tuesday, Sept.19, from 12:30-3 p.m. There is no cost to participate. Register in advance at: https://ncrl.evanced.info/signup; scroll down the calendar to the event.
• “Making it Matter: A Memoir Writing Workshop,” a four-session workshop sponsored by Methow At Home (MAH), from 12:30-3 p.m. on Thursdays, Sept. 21 and 28 and Oct. 5 and 12; all ages are welcome. More sessions may be added if enough participants are interested. The cost is $20 for MAH members or $40 for non-members; scholarships are available. Register at methowathome.org.
