House Inside the Waves Domesticity, Art and Surfing Life

9780888784285

0888784287

Writer and househusband Richard Taylor is mad about beaches and islands, and was inspired by a house exchange that whisked him and his family from a freezing Ottawa winter to a year of some of the world's best surf on the east coast of Australia. In an era of packaged paradises and cyber surfers, the forty-something author's first case of the mid-life blues seduced him into recapturing his youthful romance with surfing.Eventually he found himself adrift among women and children as he documented a Shangri-la lost dominated by a rogues' gallery of hopeless romantic-Lord Byron, Paul Gauguin, Bruce Chatwin, Robert Louis Stevenson and, perhaps the planet's first literary househusband, Henry Miller. The result was House Inside the Waves.But watch out for the sharks! Those that surfers as simply part of the food chain are the easy ones to spot, unlike the other, deadlier "sharks" like the one that took Taylor's younger sister and four-year-old son in a tragic house fire. Still, despite such dark moments, this unique travel memoir provides a joyous testament to the religion of a life lived in water.