“The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.”

Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield

Summary

Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep-sea mission that ended in catastrophe. It soon becomes clear, though, that Leah is not the same. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has brought part of it back with her, onto dry land and into their home. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night. 

Moving through something that only resembles normal life, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had before might be gone. Though Leah is still there, Miri can feel the woman she loves slipping from her grasp.

By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Our Wives Under the Sea is an exploration of the unknowable depths within each of us, and the love that compels us nevertheless toward one another.

My Thoughts

This book was genuinely one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. It is full of lush, watery imagery, body horror, queer themes, and at the center of it all, the love and grief between Miri and Leah. The chapters generally alternate between Miri and Leah’s perspective—Miri in the present day with the occasional flashback, and Leah in the past, during her time on the submarine. The prose is genuinely some of the most beautiful I have read, and the love that Miri and Leah have is vivid. The body horror element is also beautiful done and very creepily written, with imagery of melting bodies, scales, and overall deep sea horror. The ocean truly is so unknown to us, and creepy and scary and full of unexplored depths, and Armfield really draws on that. There’s a very sad human element to Miri’s story, mourning her wife for a long time, then getting her back, and slowly realizing that she might never have gotten her back to begin with. Her grief is complicated and real and hard to digest at times, and Armfield keeps you entranced the whole time. It’s not a long story, only around 200 pages or so, but I will say that the audience for this book might be a bit more niche. 

Review: ★ ★ ★ ★ 1/2

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