They’d been living on the ocean for a year when it happened. A breaching whale ran into their boat — and destroyed the vessel. Now adrift on a raft in the vast Pacific, the Baileys had little to live on. And if sharks and starvation didn’t make for enough suffering, there was also the matter of dealing with each other, and the cracks in their marriage that started splitting wider as they fought to survive. The writer Sophie Elmhirst tells the story in her new book, and she’s joining us to talk about what happens when a marriage is pushed to the furthest extremes possible.
GUEST
- Sophie Elmhirst is a journalist who writes regularly for The Guardian Long Read and The Economist. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Harper’s Bazaar, among others. Her book first book is A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck.
Originally broadcast 8/28/25