Acclaimed Author of Cult Classic Discusses Siren Song of ‘The Seas’
On May 1, the South Street Seaport Museum, in partnership with McNally Jackson Books and the online reading community Belletrist, hosted a celebration of two decades since the debut novel, “The Seas,” by author Samantha Hunt. The haunting, enchanting story, which has achieved cult status over the past two decades, focuses on a teenage narrator who longs for the return of her father who disappeared into the ocean when she was small child, falls in love with a recently returned Iraq War veteran, and believes she is a mythical creature.
“‘You’re a mermaid,’ he told me at the breakfast table,” the girl remembers of her father, early in the book. “‘Don’t forget it.’ A corner of toast scraped the roof of my mouth when he said it. The cut it made helped me to remember. So I don’t think he’s dead. I think he is in the sea swimming and that is kinder than imagining his boots filling up with water, and then his lungs.”
“These are the parts of him I find impossible to cut myself loose from,” the nameless protagonist, who inhabits a world somewhere between dreams and reality, explains later. “They are beautiful qualities. But beauty is heavy, and though I’m young I am getting tired from carrying around the bits and shreds of my father’s beauty.”
Ms. Hunt discussed “The Seas” with Alexandra Auder (author of the memoir, “Don’t Call Me Home,” about growing up in the Chelsea Hotel with an emotionally unbalanced mother), and Karah Preiss, cofounder of Belletrist.