How to Survive the Titanic is a combination of history, biography, and literary criticism. So too did the fact that Titanic scholarship has advanced in the last decade, leaving me with gaping knowledge-gaps that I wanted to fill. Its unique angle – the Titanic as seen through the prism of its most infamous survivor, White Star Line managing director J. I renounced it.Įleven years later, I was poking around Barnes & Noble trying to find a general history of World War I when I stumbled across Frances Wilson’s How to Survive the Titanic.
I became like John Laroche in Adaptation. When I finished MGY, James Cameron’s Titanic had already come and gone, and I was exhausted with the subject. This is known to occur when you spend high school working on a Titanic novel). (There is no sex because I hadn’t the experience to write a credible sex scene. The dialogue is cringe inducing there are long, pedagogic monologues and despite the fact that there are two ( two!!) love triangles occurring simultaneously, there is no sex. Unless you’re a prodigy, good writing comes from a lot of reading, and I hadn’t read enough yet to understand even the most basic concepts of characterization, storytelling, or narrative momentum. MGY is a novel, but the novelistic elements serve only as an excessively shoddy framework into which I stuffed Titanic facts and figures. I poured all the collective knowledge I’d collected from books, articles, movies, documentaries, and my parents’ AOL internet connection into this book. That obsession expanded each year, until I finally had to act. I trace my obsession with Titanic to a 1986 National Geographic special that followed Robert Ballard’s expedition to the sunken wreck. The author is my sixteen-through-eighteen year-old self. The digital version was once placed on a set of hard disks, which have long since disappeared the original computer on which it was written has also been discarded.
This binder is the only known copy of MGY in the world. Each page was inserted into a clear plastic protector, and placed in a massive teal binder, so that it resembles the safety protocols of a nuclear reactor. It was printed on a rickety printer, using two reams of paper and an extra ink cartridge. It was never edited, spell-checked or proofed. It was written in a wood-paneled basement from 1996 to 1999.
It’s called MGY (after Titanic’s wireless call sign) and weighs in at 620 Microsoft Word ’95 pages. There’s a book about the Titanic that you’ve never read. Lightoller, testimony before the United States Senate Inquiry into the Sinking of the R.M.S. Wilde, who was near him, simply bundled him into the boat…” Naturally he was there close to the boat, because he was working at the boats and he had been working at the collapsible boat, and that is why he was there, and Mr. Ismay, ‘There are no more women on board the ship.’ Wilde was a pretty big, powerful chap, and he was a man that would not argue very long. Wilde, who was near him, simply bundled him into the boat…” - Se “Chief Officer Wilde was at the starboard collapsible boat in which Mr. “Chief Officer Wilde was at the starboard collapsible boat in which Mr. In a unique work of history evocative of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Lord Jim, Wilson raises provocative moral questions about cowardice and heroism, memory and identity, survival and guilt-questions that revolve around Ismay’s loss of honor and identity as his monolithic venture-a ship called “The Last Word in Luxury” and “The Unsinkable”-was swallowed by the sea and subsumed in infamy forever. In a unique work of history evocative of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Lord Jim, Wilson raises provocative moral questions about cowa Award-winning historian Frances Wilson delivers a gripping new account of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, looking at the collision and its aftermath through the prism of the demolished life and lost honor of the ship’s owner, J. Award-winning historian Frances Wilson delivers a gripping new account of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, looking at the collision and its aftermath through the prism of the demolished life and lost honor of the ship’s owner, J.