Salt. Sand. Water. Scorching heat, smothering heat, small towns and bodies. Jellyfish. The stories I’ve been writing lately are all very similar, and they’re all a bit like Thirst for Salt, my newest obsession, written by Madelaine Lucas.
I have a deep wound inside me. I’m not going to delve into it too much (this is already a lie), but a lot of my time I spend trying to find books that might tend to it; I want to read a book that feels like salve, a book so personal it becomes my emotional crutch. I’ll read anything, but deep down, I always want reading to feel like I’m sucking the marrow off a bone.
I started writing my own novel almost two years ago to get intimate with that wound. Named Disobedience, it’s a painfully indulgent, embarrassingly personal thing. It’s about a girl adrift, recent art college graduate and jobless, and an older woman, pregnant and in denial about the failing of her marriage; it’s summer, it’s an isolated coastal town where everything’s stagnant, heavy, hot — they melt into one another. During this period, I also completed a short story about an author renting a house on an island to find the muse for her next novel; then a man turning back to the small town he was born in, then the relationship between a girl on vacation in a beach town and a local woman. Thirst for Salt is everything I have written (a lot) better. It’s Madelaine Lucas cracking open my skull and prodding at my brain, plucking my very thoughts with a delicate pair of tweezers and reordering them in a way that makes sense.
… Thinking of what Petra said about the way touch contours a body by making its boundaries known, and maybe what I wanted, what I longed for, lying there with the ocean outlining mine, was to be held in the way you’re supposed to be when you’re no longer a child.
In one of the most delicious proses I’ve read, the novel talks about a girl reflecting on the transformative relationship she had in her twenties, with a man much older than herself. She has just finished her master’s degree, on summer holiday with her mother on a small, coastal Australian town; she doesn’t have a name, but her love interest Jude gives her one, the only name we’ll know her by — Sharkbait. This is a story about love and memories, a story about longing, desire, and intimacy; a story about life itself. Unequal power dynamics and skewed relationships are at the core of this work, along with the overwhelming, all-consuming nature of first love and how desperation can shape our actions. This one is for all the nostalgic, overthinking girls out there.
There’s a name for your kind, you know, he said. Out all day, swimming till sundown. Round here we call them sharkbait.
I knew I was going to love Thirst for Salt right away. Sharkbait. Means a person who swims alone or well out from the shore, or a person who is open to being taken advantage of. And just like that, our protagonist is defined by her longing — her longing for love, for belonging, for an identity she hasn’t quite formed yet. She is quiet, observant, deeply introspective, the kind of person who watches from the edges of a room, waiting to be pulled in. She moves through the world as if she is half-formed, undefined until someone else gives her shape. This is what Jude does when he names her Sharkbait — he gives her a sense of self, even if it’s one tied to vulnerability and distance. She is both self-aware and painfully naive, knowing she is reaching for something that might not love her back but unable to stop herself. She measures her worth by how much of herself she can give away, how much space she can take up in someone else’s life, mistaking possession for intimacy. In the end, Sharkbait is a girl who lacks identity, lacks direction, and Jude sees right through her, christens her lost, christens her vulnerable. Maybe he anticipates that she’s going to attempt to find a home in him, too.
And now Jude, the man, the mystery. Hair curling behind his ears, a crease between his brows, a bump on the bridge of his nose — he’s a man gently possessive, a man who belongs to the crowds, a man who makes you feel so welcomed that you easily overlook the dark, hidden parts of him. He has a certain type of charm; Sharkbait, in her own words, reminisces that she was always a beggar for his heart, even if his heart was a dry country. Throughout the book we see her trying to catch up to him;
Wait! I called out. Two steps to his one. Running a little to keep up, chasing him through the zigzagging maze of Chinatown later that afternoon. I caught his sleeve, stamped my foor in the street. Slow down, you’re walking too fast, you’re leaving me behind!
This is like the perfect summary of their relationship; how there’s this distance between them that she has to keep chasing, and how she might bever be able to cross it — once she catches up to where Jude is, he will have already moved on and it will all be too late, a vicious cycle she’s not willing to let go of. I love how a seemingly simple scenes like this have so much beneath it. I love cracking a story open like a pomegranate and loosening all the seeds, one by one.
Water metaphors are prominent in Thirst for Salt. Relationships (not just between Sharkbait and Jude but between her and her friends, her family) are fluid, ebbing and increasing and flowing, her memory is a vast ocean; its salt stings her wounds, she finds solace in the embrace of the waves. There are no quotation marks used to indicate people talking, everything is obfuscated, blending into and tumbling over each other. The characters are deep, complex.
Motherhood, in this novel, is also explored in a way that is both tender and familiar. The protagonist’s relationship with her mother is distant yet quietly foundational — her mother is always there, steady and practical, the kind of woman who has long since hardened against the kind of heartbreak her daughter is experiencing. In contrast, Sharkbait views motherhood through the lens of longing, not as a role to step into but as a way to hold onto something slipping away. She wonders if having Jude’s child would be the closest she could come to keeping a version of him, something that belongs to her in a way he never fully did. It’s not a romanticized view of motherhood but an aching, almost desperate one — a way to preserve love, to make it tangible, to hold onto something before it vanishes like a tide pulling away from the shore. This wasn’t always the case but for a year or two now I’ve been spending a great amount of time imagining my own family, with my favorite person in my head, and the way Thirst for Salt talks about this exact subject was very soothing; I’ve never actually felt brave enough to bring it up with anyone else, not in a completely honest way, anyway, but Madelaine Lucas’ words made me feel understood. They comforted me.
I think what makes this novel so effective is how well it understands longing — not just for love, but for something more abstract, something unnameable. Sharkbait’s need to be seen and be anchored by someone else feels heartbreakingly real, so very familiar. And Jude — intoxicating, distant, forever just out of reach — is the perfect catalyst for this kind of love story, the kind that shapes a person long after it has ended.
In the end, Madelaine Lucas’s writing is evocative, richly atmospheric, capturing both the beauty of this world and the intricacies of human emotion. This is a special book that will stay with me for a long time, much like the ghost of a first love, lingering in the salt air. I can’t wait to get back to it over and over again.
