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Crossing: A True Story
In early Spring of 2022, the author boarded a 52-foot sailboat to cross the Atlantic with a close friend and a captain and sailor he did not know.
From the start of the 2,600-mile trip, from St. Martin in the Caribbean to the Azores off Portugal, things went awry— with the captain, the boat, the weather and, most precipitously, the author’s state of mind. As a recreational sailor with no experience of being out of sign of land, the author’s darkest fears materialized as the small crew sailed through squalls then gales and, finally, a tropical storm with near-hurricane force winds.
In Crossing, Glyn Vincent explores why he ventured into the middle of the ocean in the first place, and how he first fell in love with the sea. He describes his unsettled childhood in New York City, his parents’ tabloid existence (his mother was the Broadway and television actress Betsy von Furstenberg) and the itinerant, unstable lives of his grandparents and great-grandparents, whose troubled history goes back on his mother’s side to a Gothic castle in Germany and on his father’s side to an orphanage in Alexandria, Egypt, and a massacre in Damascus in 1860.
In the end, this enthralling memoir is as much about the storm Vincent inherited and harbored within, as it is about the one he encountered at sea.
From the start of the 2,600-mile trip, from St. Martin in the Caribbean to the Azores off Portugal, things went awry— with the captain, the boat, the weather and, most precipitously, the author’s state of mind. As a recreational sailor with no experience of being out of sign of land, the author’s darkest fears materialized as the small crew sailed through squalls then gales and, finally, a tropical storm with near-hurricane force winds.
In Crossing, Glyn Vincent explores why he ventured into the middle of the ocean in the first place, and how he first fell in love with the sea. He describes his unsettled childhood in New York City, his parents’ tabloid existence (his mother was the Broadway and television actress Betsy von Furstenberg) and the itinerant, unstable lives of his grandparents and great-grandparents, whose troubled history goes back on his mother’s side to a Gothic castle in Germany and on his father’s side to an orphanage in Alexandria, Egypt, and a massacre in Damascus in 1860.
In the end, this enthralling memoir is as much about the storm Vincent inherited and harbored within, as it is about the one he encountered at sea.
232 pages, Hardcover
Published June 24, 2025
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11 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 16, 2025
Jack Sparrow Wrestles Freud on the High Seas
Fantastic ocean sailing merged with poignant memoir and powerful prose. Author’s genuine and heartfelt reflection on his life is the hidden nugget in this literary gem.
Highly recommended!
Jim R. - NYC
Fantastic ocean sailing merged with poignant memoir and powerful prose. Author’s genuine and heartfelt reflection on his life is the hidden nugget in this literary gem.
Highly recommended!
Jim R. - NYC
October 9, 2025
Crossing: A True Story, by Glyn Vincent
Reviewed by Stephen Molton
Late in mid-life, this author was prompted to take a leap into the void, a vaguely planned voyage across the Atlantic with an impetuous friend, an inadequate crew, and a brooding, idiosyncratic captain. And the greatest leap of all would be the one into the void of his own self-knowledge. Seventy percent of Earth’s surface is covered by water, and our selves might be just as covered in mystery but for those moments, whether deliberately sought or forced upon us, when we must come to terms with who we really are.
This memoir is the logbook of such a voyage.
The Self versus Nature genre is as much about the struggle with oneself as it is a vast, unstoppable foe that means you no harm, personally. Nature is never an antagonist, per se. It is without hidden intentions, so far as we know. But when you go up against its boundlessness, you’d better be ready.
Was there any way for Vincent to have prepared? Yes. But by the time he set sail, it wasn’t quite preparation enough. Accustomed to daysailers that never took him beyond the sight of land, he knew all the basics but few of the torments that could arise even in the best of circumstances.
And the question of why and how he suspended certain judgements at the outset becomes the journey’s internal destination. The son of a gifted Broadway ingenue and an elusive European businessman, Vincent had grown up in a kind of care-worn glamour. His mother’s mercurial ambition and his father’s hearty, rapscallion bonhomie masked a chronic sense of instability, preoccupation and betrayal that colored Vincent’s entire youth, made him an outlier among the insiders.
The revelations of this book come quietly, as if in the rare, exhausted moments he made it below deck when what was above was simply harrowing. There wasn’t time to dwell too long. If he was going to plumb the depths of himself, he’d have to do it in a black gale over the deepest depths on Earth. It’s as if the illuminations are snatched from the whirlwind— preciously paid for, strangely circumspect, and very private in their way, like intimate admissions to oneself in the night. Vincent keeps explicit subjectivity to a minimum, letting our impressions of “why” he took such risks accumulate slowly, like a light snow. For all the drama, topside, the inner atmosphere of the book is very subtle, not guarded, exactly, but solitary. There is a moment, between terrible gales, when Glyn and the inscrutable captain are sitting silently side-by-side, reading the horizon, and the look in his eyes, in profile, reminds Glyn of…himself, as if the unreadable is only visible to the blind. It’s in very filigreed instances like this that Vincent opens up “the mystery of the self” until it gathers into a propelling undercurrent that seems to be everywhere and nowhere, like the sea. Strange. Beautiful. And perilously, thunderously beyond the beyond.
Emotionally speaking, Vincent “brings us alongside” himself again, and again but never quite onboard. It was a rare sensation for this reader, perhaps a result of the writer’s literary virtuosity. The revelations here rise from his playwright’s natural reliance on subtext along with his journalist’s attempts at self-erasure. He’s revealed, nonetheless, but never for the sake of an easy climax. It’s way too late in this life for any facile notions of closure.
But over the length of his odyssey, the familiar truths of his upbringing keep posing an unfamiliar question—how to live with what he can’t forget; how to find empathy and perhaps even tenderness for those who induced the very solitude that has brought him aboard this boat in the first place. And perhaps even how to extend some tenderness to himself, for a change.
And what lies beneath, even deeper, is an undertow of spiritual need, a communion with nature as a timeless portal into that which cannot be spoken, but exists in us, nonetheless.
A memoir twinkling with insights, like doubloons at the bottom of a heaving sea.
Reviewed by Stephen Molton
Late in mid-life, this author was prompted to take a leap into the void, a vaguely planned voyage across the Atlantic with an impetuous friend, an inadequate crew, and a brooding, idiosyncratic captain. And the greatest leap of all would be the one into the void of his own self-knowledge. Seventy percent of Earth’s surface is covered by water, and our selves might be just as covered in mystery but for those moments, whether deliberately sought or forced upon us, when we must come to terms with who we really are.
This memoir is the logbook of such a voyage.
The Self versus Nature genre is as much about the struggle with oneself as it is a vast, unstoppable foe that means you no harm, personally. Nature is never an antagonist, per se. It is without hidden intentions, so far as we know. But when you go up against its boundlessness, you’d better be ready.
Was there any way for Vincent to have prepared? Yes. But by the time he set sail, it wasn’t quite preparation enough. Accustomed to daysailers that never took him beyond the sight of land, he knew all the basics but few of the torments that could arise even in the best of circumstances.
And the question of why and how he suspended certain judgements at the outset becomes the journey’s internal destination. The son of a gifted Broadway ingenue and an elusive European businessman, Vincent had grown up in a kind of care-worn glamour. His mother’s mercurial ambition and his father’s hearty, rapscallion bonhomie masked a chronic sense of instability, preoccupation and betrayal that colored Vincent’s entire youth, made him an outlier among the insiders.
The revelations of this book come quietly, as if in the rare, exhausted moments he made it below deck when what was above was simply harrowing. There wasn’t time to dwell too long. If he was going to plumb the depths of himself, he’d have to do it in a black gale over the deepest depths on Earth. It’s as if the illuminations are snatched from the whirlwind— preciously paid for, strangely circumspect, and very private in their way, like intimate admissions to oneself in the night. Vincent keeps explicit subjectivity to a minimum, letting our impressions of “why” he took such risks accumulate slowly, like a light snow. For all the drama, topside, the inner atmosphere of the book is very subtle, not guarded, exactly, but solitary. There is a moment, between terrible gales, when Glyn and the inscrutable captain are sitting silently side-by-side, reading the horizon, and the look in his eyes, in profile, reminds Glyn of…himself, as if the unreadable is only visible to the blind. It’s in very filigreed instances like this that Vincent opens up “the mystery of the self” until it gathers into a propelling undercurrent that seems to be everywhere and nowhere, like the sea. Strange. Beautiful. And perilously, thunderously beyond the beyond.
Emotionally speaking, Vincent “brings us alongside” himself again, and again but never quite onboard. It was a rare sensation for this reader, perhaps a result of the writer’s literary virtuosity. The revelations here rise from his playwright’s natural reliance on subtext along with his journalist’s attempts at self-erasure. He’s revealed, nonetheless, but never for the sake of an easy climax. It’s way too late in this life for any facile notions of closure.
But over the length of his odyssey, the familiar truths of his upbringing keep posing an unfamiliar question—how to live with what he can’t forget; how to find empathy and perhaps even tenderness for those who induced the very solitude that has brought him aboard this boat in the first place. And perhaps even how to extend some tenderness to himself, for a change.
And what lies beneath, even deeper, is an undertow of spiritual need, a communion with nature as a timeless portal into that which cannot be spoken, but exists in us, nonetheless.
A memoir twinkling with insights, like doubloons at the bottom of a heaving sea.
January 5, 2026
A riveting and absorbing read. Glyn Vincent writes with candour and a certain vulnerability which is heart warming. I didn't want the book to end. I hope there's another book in the works!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews