DEEP WATERS
A Memoir of Loss, Alaska Adventure, and Love Rekindled
She Writes Press • May 2023
Eric Hoffer First Horizon Award
FINALIST Superior Work by Debut Authors
Next Generation Indie Book Awards
WINNER Memoirs: Personal Struggle/Health Issues
Independent Publishers Book Awards, IPPY
Bronze Award West-Pacific: Best Regional Non-Fiction
A marine biologist’s fulfilling life as a professor, wife, and mother in Alaska is upended when her healthy husband is slammed by a rare type of stroke. His radical approach to recovery clashes with her instinct to keep him safe at home and sets them on a collision course as he insists on ambitious sailing expeditions with Beth and their young son in Alaska’s magnificent yet unforgiving waters. Deep Waters is a gripping story of relationship resilience set against the backdrop of Alaska’s dramatic marine wilderness.
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Praise for Deep Waters
“Deep Waters is a survival story of the highest order, navigating the complex terrain of marriage, medical crisis, and a future reimagined. After the trauma of her husband’s stroke, Mathews returns to a basic truth: through love, we discover who we are, and who we hope to become."
—CAROLINE VAN HEMERT, award-winning author of The Sun is a Compass
". . . an incisive, smartly informative memoir that celebrates the power of the cohesive family unit—its outcome will offer positivity and hope to those facing similar challenges."
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Urgent, informative, emotionally satisfying and thought-provoking, Deep Waters opens with a harrowing medical mystery and rewards the reader with a loving account of an adventurous partnership made stronger by crisis.”
—ANDROMEDA ROMANO-LAX, author of Annie and the Wolves
"If books were birds, this one would be an arctic tern – powerful and graceful, beset by storms and learning to survive and more: to thrive. The writing is feather-light yet strong.”
—KIM HEACOX, author of Jimmy Bluefeather and The Only Kayak: A Journey into the Heart of Alaska
“With love as rugged and wild as the Alaskan landscape she made home, biologist Beth Ann Mathews tells the story of another wilderness: marriage after a life-altering stroke. Deep Waters is a thoughtful and provoking read, a reminder that life and love are inexplicably fragile and resilient, full of unexpected discovery.”
—ABBY MASLIN, author of Love you Hard: A Memoir of Marriage, Brain Injury, and Reinventing Love
"Mathews writes with poignant honesty about the challenges of marriage, family and community in a moving story that highlights the strengths of human relationships. Deep Waters starts with a bang and just keeps going: lively, vivid, and personal."
—ROMAN DIAL, author of The Adventurer’s Son: A Memoir
“Mathews has penned a deeply personal love story with the careful rigor of the scientist she is, free of any giddy prose or rainbows. Instead, Deep Waters comes at the reader with the gloves off and goes a full twelve rounds, documenting in granular detail the fears and conflicts attending a life-altering event that can drive even a strong relationship onto the ropes, and the endurance, commitment, and deep love that can save it.”
—LYNN SCHOOLER, critically acclaimed author of The Blue Bear and Walking Home
"Poignant, profound, and powerful.”
— MARV JENSEN, Superintendent of Glacier Bay National Park 1988-1994.
“We felt like we were there with Beth, sharing her emotions, anguish and struggles through the stroke, hospital stay, and recovery. We felt like part of the family as we read, gasped, cried and hoped for recovery and for peace in her heart.”
—TBD BOOK CLUB, Seattle, WA