A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving: Lessons on Love, Care, and Survival: A Memoir

by Virginia Eubanks

A spirited, wise, often hilarious, profoundly moving story of one woman's efforts to survive caregiving, trauma, love, and the systems seemingly set up to fail us.

Only if you are a very able swimmer trained in open-water rescue should you approach drowning victims . . . Reach with a rope or branch, rowout and offer the drowning person an oar. Do not get in the water.

But
No one survives the wilderness alone.

One night, Virginia Eubanks received the kind of news we all fear. Her partner, Jason, had been attacked, brutally beaten just steps from their house. In the weeks, then months and years that followed, they faced a cascade of police disinterest, suspended health insurance, inadequate medical care, lost income, lost friends, endless paperwork, and a serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Then, a second case. In her time tending to Jason, Eubanks had developed what is known as “collateral” PTSD, common among caregivers but rarely discussed.

A reporter and an activist, Eubanks turned to reliable sources to figure out how to scientists, therapists, trauma theorists, social movements. But it wasn’t until she happened on an old lifesaving manual that she found practical advice that actually helped. Inspired by these lessons, she signed up for a series of kayak selfrescue, winter survival 101, map and compass, bushwhacking, wilderness first aid, lifeguarding. In a memoir as disarmingly funny as it is quietly wise, Eubanks draws lessons in kinship from these experiences, her research, and interviews with everyone from neuroscientists to forest rangers. The result is a genuinely moving, hopeful, darkly funny story of two people caught in their own kind of wilderness, trying not just to survive but to truly care for each other. Built from cataclysmic loss and tenacious love, A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving challenges readers to reconsider the networks of care that sustain our lives, reminding us that no one survives the wilderness alone.

384 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication August 11, 2026

About the author

Virginia Eubanks is a professor and an investigative journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, WIRED.com, and Scientific American. She is the author of the award-winning book Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. When not sleeping in her truck in the Adirondacks, she lives in Troy, New York.

Reviews

[Venneh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whether or not it's what she intended with the title, Eubanks' memoir is also a fucking fantastic guide to surviving when your partner is diagnosed with PTSD, and when your own boundaries have to come into play. Eubanks pairs discussions of lifeguarding and survival and emergencies with its own kind of emergency - surviving with a partner with c-PTSD and harmful coping methods, and the point when you have to pull out to put on your own gasmask. I have a feeling a lot of people are going to have issue with the fact that this doesn't end "happily" (ie, the relationship is saved and cPTSD never reared its ugly head again), but ends in the best possible place for everyone involved. (Also, Professor Eubanks - what you survived was abuse, even if it didn't meet all the typical presentations.) It's up there for one of hte most unique things I've read in a while, and I can't wait for you to read it this summer.

[Lauren Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh this book! Such a raw and immersive journey into PTSD. It was one of those books I had to read slowly to not only savour but to take the time to process the emotions that came with it. I had already started telling family members to read it before I had finished it. Can’t wait for it to come out so they can experience it as well.

Thank you to the publisher for the ARC!