Blerina’s Reviews > Maurice and Maralyn: An Extraordinary True Story of Love, Shipwreck and Survival > Status Update

“Fame had taught Maurice one of its many questionable lessons: that it is possible to perform life for the sake of a good photograph.”

“Unlike Maurice, only too willing to trawl back over his weaknesses, Maralyn was already painting over the cracks. She seemed to want to give an impression of uncorrupted resilience. They’d survived, hadn’t they? Why dwell on the problems?”

Usually, the stars lend perspective, a leavening sense of one’s own insignificance. Maurice looked up and saw only himself, only his flaws; the hope that he might become someone better.

Emigration contains two forces: the pull of what you are going towards, or what you imagine you are going towards, and the release from what you are leaving behind, or what you imagine you are leaving behind. As they sailed away, it seemed clear that their old life was ending and their new life beginning. He was free.

- Why Maurice chose Maralyn was obvious. “I needed someone like Maralyn in my life to make up for the confidence I lacked” he wrote. She coloured in his gaps.

- Maurice had lived a decade according to his own precise rhythm. It was difficult for him to imagine bending to someone else.

- Faith wasn’t about belief as much as behavior. Sunday school and reading the Bible—it was what you did and it made you good.

- Maurice would tease Bob, which Bob hated it, but it was only the natural order of things, the way families pass down pain like an inheritance.