Sea State is...a mixture of journalism, chronicling the sociological, financial and more immediately physical issues faced by the men...as well as the effect this work has on their wives, families and the wider society ... It’s also a highly personal account of living on the fringes of one’s own life, in what could be described as a prolonged moment of crisis (while also being, regularly, laugh-out-loud-funny) ... What sets Lasley apart as a genuinely exceptional writer is her ability to first spot, and then effectively relay, the small yet defining details of a person, scene or experience ... Her eye for usually imperceptible minutiae is especially sharp when it comes to the physical and linguistic cues that pass between the sexes, along with the inexorable conditions of their interrelations ... Sea State is contemporary writing at its finest, without any hint of effort, egoism or pretentiousness on Lasley’s part. She is an astoundingly good writer, and this is an astoundingly good book.

... a peculiar and entrancing blend of memoir and reportage ... Smart about sexual desire and the ease of analyzing — but the difficulty of escaping — familiar gender roles, Sea State offers a close up view of the white, working-class resentments that helped fuel both Brexit and the Trump presidency. As a journalist, Lasley commits the cardinal sin of getting involved with one of her subjects; but as memoirist, her transgression saves Sea State from the tone of faintly anthropological distance that books about the working class often have ... As it turns out, Sea State. has more than enough calming introspection and roiling antagonisms to make it well worth the ride.

If many autofictionists are interior writers with all the lights on, mansions of subjective quirks, Lasley is the whole street, with a much more connected sense of other people. She takes for granted an unapologetic tone we used only to associate with male writers ... The men, too, are deracinated, and Sea State reveals something of the inner lives of these lost beings. It’s strange to find such a mixture, and it’s devastatingly effective in this slow-paced, issue-facing memoir ... How far would you go for a story? How far would you go to be a story? Lasley throws herself into her task with the kind of energy that rises from mania like steam. I never stopped admiring her, and the sentences just get better, but what the fuck? ... She has the skill, a Joan Didion kind of skill, of inflecting non-fiction material subjectively, a habit of assessing situations via her nervous system ... (I almost wrote ‘novel’, because Sea State has all the presentness of fiction, as well as the exactitude of the non-fiction novel and the gleam of confession) ... You can feel you have traveled full circle by the end of this book, a journey that locks you into a world and makes you feel its weight. No matter how true the story happens to be, Lansley is a ghost of her own experience, haunting the rooms in her mind where it did and didn’t happen. She conjures an industry and a place, but much more than that, she shows us the men themselves, and their relation to her, a mysterious tale of love and fear. The single thing we can know for sure, as she leaves the city, is that there must be a book, and only she can write it.

Lasley is a gifted interlocutor, teasing out startling confessions (one of her 103 interviewees confesses to a murder) and insights about the cliques, fights and hierarchies of a dangerous vocation. The book’s hybrid of ethnography, journalism and disclosure might have been disastrous in the hands of someone without Lasley’s candor and style. Instead, Sea State accomplishes what many memoirs do not: It organizes a messy life with a clear vision.

Sea State is part reportage, part memoir, and the collision of the two is initially discombobulating – one moment the author is reflecting on the grotesque failures that led to the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster, which killed 167, and the next she is trying to take a photo of her breasts to send Caden on his third week offshore. It nonetheless builds a grey-hued portrait of a ruthless industry, a dour city and a breed of man who thinks nothing of calling a woman a whore for putting her hand on a man’s arm in a pub, and is shocked when she tries to buy a round of drinks ... Lasley’s methods for meeting her subjects are unorthodox, and her capacity for recklessness quite breathtaking ... The cold facts of this rarefied job hit hard, but so do the social observations gleaned in a fog of drunken chatter ... Sea State is, itself, a hybrid of sorts: an investigation that is also a confession but reads a lot like a novel. It is a startlingly original study of love, masculinity and the cost of a profession that few outside of it can truly understand. The cost to Lasley herself is yet to be revealed.

Original ... Lasley dutifully lays out the reality – the horror, really – of making a living in the middle of the North Sea, as well as the oil companies’ decades-long war of attrition with workers’ and human rights. Along the way though – in fact, for most of the book – she takes in a whole range of evergreen issues. Sea State is a layer-cake of age, class, sex, politics and gender, and the more Lasley inspects the cross-sections, the more we see there’s hardly any filling to keep the layers apart ... As much as the book is about what men are like with no women (or one woman) around, it is about what a woman is like with no real friends around ... This final generous tranche of dialogue also magnifies an already extraordinary element of the book: Lasley’s verbal talent (putting her prodigious personal memory aside), not only as a writer with a Jamesian penchant for French phrases but also as a quick-witted conversationist. Lasley never puts a foot wrong in these exchanges, which gives this piece of nonfiction more than a hint of the fictional ... The literary neatness is mostly to the book’s credit.

Lasley’s project...quickly abandons any pretense of being an objective study of a masculine industry in decline. What Sea State becomes instead is a blistering account of self-destruction—that of the men who work offshore, yes, but mostly Lasley’s own ... how precisely their tryst becomes a full-blown affair is left off the page. This omission is of a piece with Lasley’s refreshing disdain for the reader’s desire to know exactly what is going on at all times, who is speaking which lines, what is truth and what’s a fabrication. As in real life, key details are only revealed in their full context long after they’ve been introduced ... Lasley’s interviewees appear at the start of each chapter. A few read almost like punchlines ... Many others, though, are poignant, or at least revealing of the double life that so many offshore workers feel the job forces them to live ... Lasley is perceptive, too, about the uneasy class position of the offshore workers, many of whom come from working-class backgrounds but whose occupation allows them a level of material comfort that eludes many bourgeois, city-dwelling professionals today ... Sea State’s slide into the personal doesn’t wind up feeling like a loss. Lasley’s writing is energetic and occasionally impressionistic. She is prone to self-indulgent disquisitions on the beauty of dance music like UK garage and seems nimbler with details than structures. All of this makes for a fresh and unpredictable prose style but would be an obvious liability in any bird’s-eye view of the oil industry. And perhaps most crucially, Lasley makes for as compelling a character as any of the men she speaks to.

Laskey’s prose is dizzying in its descriptions of obsession, brutal work, and loneliness. The oil workers lives are hard and unforgiving, and Lasky taps into their exhaustion as she becomes their mirror image: while her lover is at sea her life is suspended, and she craves the intensity of each of his return.

Breathtaking ... Rendered in irresistible prose, her whirlwind affair becomes a humanizing subplot and an arresting character study of the prototypical oil rigger, one who compartmentalizes home and work, wife and mistress, lavish spending and crushing isolation. The result is a compassionate portrayal of what it takes to survive an inhospitable corner of the world.

In poetically hard-edged prose, Lasley explores offshore rigging culture and the anti–workers’ rights culture that created it. She also shows how the hypermuscular capitalism in which it is entrenched deforms, and often destroys, relationships ... A raw, bold, unsparing memoir.