SAILING
For Sara, sailing was first a gift to Phil, a symbol of her belief that he would survive his mortal illness another summer. For Phil, sailing was both self-discovery and escape--from his fears, from his doctors, from Sara's constant vigilance.
Following the characters and events of In Another Country, this novel portrays two people faced with a one crisis after another who react in very different, even diametrically opposed ways. It is the story of two ordinary people who vacillate between frantic, hurtful terror and stoical, heartbreaking heroics, a story about not giving up, about recognizing that there are no easy answers, and about learning to go on without hope.
(Excerpt from Chapter 1: "Sailing")
When she comes back, he is still standing on the dock, staring out across the bay. Sara stands close to him, slides her hand between his arm and side. He doesn't speak, doesn't look at her. After a while she withdraws her arm, and they stand side by side, not touching, staring at the water. The wind is gentler now, the waves no longer frayed with white. ''I bought the boat,'' Sara says finally. Phil nods. It is not sailing so much as the idea of sailing, not boats, but the idea of boats. He looks at Sara curiously, as if from far away. He wonders if she has acted out of knowledge, faith, or sheer bravado. He wonders what, if anything, she knows, and how she knows it. But then it hardly matters; she has already said that she will sail it herself. Life will go on without him after all. . . .
''You can always sail it yourself,'' he says.
''You'll be here,'' Sara answers.
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Of Sailing, C.D. Bryan wrote in The New York Times Book Review: "Susan Kenney's ''Sailing'' is more than remarkable, it's real. One reads it as one read ''In Another Country'': with admiration for her, her family and for the honesty, grace and understanding with which she writes of scudding the menace and caress of life's towering waves."
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In an interview that accompanied the review, Robin Pogrebin wrote:
"People say, 'Life is a voyage,' but I wanted to make it real,'' Ms. Kenney said in a telephone interview from her home in Maine. ''When you're on the ocean, you're in danger. This danger is deathly, it can kill you, but you can also float on it, it can take you places you want to go.'' In the novel, the danger Sara Boyd feels while sailing mirrors the precariousness of her husband's life in the face of a fatal disease.
The book is based on a true story that has yet to have a happy ending; Ms. Kenney's husband, who teaches English full time, has been struggling with cancer for the last 11 years. After two years of experimental chemotherapy, he has not been cured.
''If you can make something beautiful out of something awful, it helps a lot,'' she said, about her wish to finish her book. ''Once something like this happens, it's never ever over. You can never go back to the innocence, you can only go forward, you can only go on.''
Click on the link below for the full text of the review and accompanying material.