Wavewalker and Pizza
A memoir about a childhood at sea, and a cheesy cast-iron pie
Hello and welcome to Good Book/Good Bread!
Last week I had the good fortune to find myself in Powell’s Books in downtown Portland. I delighted in walking the many levels of the sprawling bookstore on a Friday night, and came across Wavewalker: A Memoir of Breaking Free by Suzanne Heywood. I began it that night before bed, and was so immediately engrossed that I had finished it within three days. On paper it sounds like Heywood and her family lived the dream navigating the world on their sailboat, but the reality was much more complicated.
I think this was my favourite non-fiction book I’ve read this year. I hope you enjoy the below review and pizza recipe, and let me know your favourite non-fiction picks in the comments!
Good Book: Wavewalker: A Memoir of Breaking Free by Suzanne Heywood
Wavewalker in a nutshell
Wavewalker is Suzanne Heywood’s memoir of a childhood spent with her parents and brother travelling the world on a sailboat. When she was seven, Heywood’s parents sold their home in England to buy a sailboat, named Wavewalker. The family then crossed the oceans for a decade, stopping occasionally to make money and gather supplies or new crew members in destinations like New Zealand, Australia, Fiji and Tonga.
Though her parents promised to homeschool her, they neglected that commitment. As a teenager, Suzanne struggled to carve out time to teach herself science, math, and history on board amid her full time job cooking, cleaning, and keeping watch at sea. She craved normalcy and education, but found herself stuck inside her parents’ dream of sailing the world. While there were wonderful experiences sailing, like seeing whales, visiting small island nations, and learning navigational skills, Heywood also experienced emotional abuse and physical injuries from being caught in harrowing storms at sea.
Wavewalker in Three Words
Adventurous, honest, resilient
Structure
Wavewalker is told in first person by Heywood. It is chronological, beginning when she was six in England and ending when she enters university.
What I liked about Wavewalker
Perspective is kept in the moment
There was very little reflection in Wavewalker from Heywood as an adult on her childhood and teenage years. She keeps the memoir firmly planted at the age she is writing about, allowing the reader to understand more fully some of her traumatic events—for example, being left by her parents at an orphanage on a tropical island for a night as a little kid, with no explanation.
Heywood’s grasping for connections
One of the more heartbreaking parts of Wavewalker was when Heywood’s family would reach a port. They would often stay for a week or two. Occasionally they would stay for a few months if their sailboat needed repairs, they required more funds, or if they had to find paying passengers for their next ocean crossing. During these stays Heywood would always find other kids to befriend, revelling in the normalcy of going to their houses for sleepovers or playdates. During one longer stay in Australia, she even got to briefly attend a real school. Inevitably however, the sailboat would be fixed, passengers found, or money made, and it would be time to set off on the next adventure. Heywood again and again had to say goodbye to the connections she had formed.
Her tenacity
Heywood’s recounting of her efforts to gain entry into Oxford University are a masterclass in persistence. She enrolled herself in a correspondence course through a school in Queensland, Australia, as a teenager, and fought every day for time to do her work. She had no one to ask for help when she didn’t understand a calculus equation, nowhere to actually spread her work out, and had a full-time job as a crew member, including three hour watches in the middle of the night.
When Heywood completed assignments, she’d have to mail them in a port post office, and hope they were marked and mailed by her teachers to the next port post office her family would reach in time. When she was 17, her parents left her alone in a cabin in New Zealand to finish her correspondence course. Her visa was going to expire before she could sit her final exams in Auckland, but she couldn’t renew it without her parents, who were at sea and unreachable. Heywood’s ability to navigate all of these challenges and still reach her goals is tremendously impressive.
Quote I liked
“He looked at me, and in his eyes I saw something that I recognized all too well — the fear of being trapped in someone else's dream.”
Good Bread: Pizza
Why this bread for this book
Much of Heywood’s pain in Wavewalker comes from a longing for normalcy. I could think of nothing that would pair better with that feeling than a very cheesy pizza, a classic kid-friendly dinner.
Recipe
I used a pizza dough recipe from Allrecipes, found here. I added three tablespoons of sourdough starter as well. For toppings, I used some leftover roasted cauliflower, zucchini, goat cheese, mozzarella, grated parmesan, and Calabrian hot pepper flakes. I baked it in my cast-iron pan, and it was delicious!
Looking forward:
Book I’m looking forward to reading: Tree Thieves by Lyndsie Bourgon
Music I’m looking forward to listening to: Tigers Blood by Waxahatchee
Bread I’m looking forward to baking: Sourdough with carrots and curry powder
This is amazing and the pizza looks delicious! Can’t wait to try it out on next payday!
As always, I enjoy your book takes paired with food. Hungry for pizza and a good yarn now, though this book sounds like it might make me sad for this child who wasn’t allowed a normal childhood, though she did come away with a great story to tell.