You guys, the sea is huge and scary, stunning and sublime. No matter how many times I think about its vastness, my brain falls short of comprehension. Growing up in the Midwest on the shores of the beautiful but way less threatening Great Lake Michigan, I didn’t swim in any ocean until I was 19 years old. When I finally did, off the coast of Costa Rica on a spring break trip in 1999, I had the first and most intense panic attack of my life. My abiding fear and awe of the ocean are a large part of why I wanted to write Man Overboard!, a novel about a 33-year-old Nebraska man named Kick Kilpatrick—physical therapist by day, gym bro by side hustle—who falls (or jumps?) off a cruise ship into the Gulf of Mexico while on a Thanksgiving vacation with his extended family, then has to spend the next several hours desperately treading water and hoping for rescue. It’s a comedy!
Like me, Kick is an enormous fan of survival stories of all kinds, having grown up consuming Reader’s Digest’s Drama in Real Life feature, obsessing over narratives of people getting mauled by bears and dragging themselves to safety or digging themselves out from backcountry avalanches. But the ones that most haunted me—and therefore haunt Kick—are the accounts of people lost at sea, struggling to be found. Researching this novel, I read and reread a lot of literature about that sort of plight, finding these to be some of the very best.
