The Starless Sea
and climbing out of a rut

There are some places that only something magical can scoop you out of. For the miserable reading rut I’d melted unceremoniously into, The Starless Sea was exactly this kind of necessary magic.

It found me through the hands of some good friends I was visiting in Vermont. They handed it to me on the evening I arrived: a black, cloth-bound, sizable book with golden images and no words on its cover. Little did I know, it was a prop that had fallen out of the very world described in its own pages. So #Meta.

“Whatever you’re reading right now, stop reading it, and read this instead,” they said. I looked at this small tome of a book and thought, there’s no way I can read this in a week.

“Okay!” Is what came out of my mouth instead.

I was reading two or three books at that time but not because I was really invested in any of them. Actually, nothing was really resonating with me at all, so I just kept starting new books and dropping off until I was barely reading anything. I was wandering through books like someone who isn’t hungry looks at a menu: What am I doing here again?

Oscar Wilde once said,

“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”

… So, what does that make you when you can’t manage to read anything at all? A goldfish, maybe?

I sat down with The Starless Sea the next morning, curled up in my pajamas with a cup of hot coffee in the mixture of chilly air and warm sun reflecting off of Lake Champlain out the window; having marginal expectations about my ability to release myself from vapid, golden fishitude and read the first chapter (which was all of three pages long):

There is a pirate in the basement.
(The pirate is a metaphor but also still a person.)

– The Starless Sea, p. 3

Oh. What, now? Pirates and metaphors AND alliteration? This was going to be perfect.
(see what I did there?)

This was going to be the book to bring me back to the land of the reading.

I stepped inside Morganstern’s book-flavored mythical world one Anthropologie-rustic staircase and trendy iconographic at a time. After I left Vermont, I bought my own copy and took it with me into mid-day dissertation-writing breaks in the bathtub. I’d read about sipping old-school cocktails and visiting with well-placed, unironic cats. I’d search for clues as to what happened to fate’s heart.

All the while seeing quite clearly that this was a work of nearly perfect, textbook fiction. Morganstern says all the right things at exactly the right times. Not only that, but she clearly wrote the book for exactly me. In fact, I am certain that when she mapped out her target audience, she just put down a picture of my face. But maybe that’s just my millennial showing.

Morganstern constructed characters who face problems like my own, identity crises like my own, and spoke directly about things that haunt me – even down to my irrational fear of not being able to move my arms – like in this nightmare described on page 279:

Nightmare number 113:

I am sitting in a very big chair and I cannot get out of it. My arms are tied to the chair arms and my hands are gone. There are people without faces standing around me feeding me pieces of paper that have all the things I am supposed to be written on them but they never ask me what I am.

– The Starless Sea, p. 279

It’s just. so. on. point.

Still, it was treasure and joy to fall into this book because it took me out of COVID world and into literature themed cocktail parties on snowy nights; out of the feelings of failure that come with living at home as an adult and into a world where success is only measured by not losing one’s SELF; out of not knowing where to go next or when to make my next move and into an underground library that magically fulfills all one’s needs and desires and exists outside of time.

“It was about a hidden kingdom. Like a sanctuary place and no one knew where it was exactly but you found it when you needed it. It called out in dreams or sang siren songs and then you found a magic door or portal or whatever. Not always but sometimes. You had to believe it or just be lucky, I guess.” (p. 465)

I’m so grateful to The Starless Sea (and the friends who recommended it) because it not only got me reading again but it reminded me of all the wonderful things that happen when you trust without knowing, learn without ambition, and love without needing a how or a why.

Am I just lucky? I don’t think so. But I am thrilled to find what other portals await me from here.

Books & References

The Starless Sea by Erin Morganstern (2019)