Crossing: A True Story Format: Hardback

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 sight 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.

Glyn Vincent is a journalist and the author of The Unknown Night, a biography of the American artist R.A. Blakelock. A finalist for the National Magazine Award, his articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The New York Observer, The Paris Review, Columbia Magazine, The Huffington Post and many other publications. He was born in New York City and graduated from Harvard and Columbia University School of Journalism. A keen outdoorsman, Vincent is actively involved with local environmental organizations on Long Island, where he also saltwater fly-fishes and sails.