Our Wives Under the Sea is a 2022 novel by Julia Armfield. It's a work of queer fiction that uses the concept of someone coming back wrong to connect to the feeling of losing someone you love.
Leah and Miri live in England, where Leah is an undersea explorer for a marine exploration organization called The Centre. After an expedition to the bottom of the ocean, she comes back with her body and mindset altered; her skin is changing texture and color, she spends most of her time sitting in the bathtub, and Miri can tell she's not the same person she initially fell in love with. Miri is left to accept that Leah as she know her may be completely gone, while attempting to figure out just what happened to Leah when she was underwater.
Leah's flashback is told throughout the book, interspliced with Miri's. She goes into a submarine with two of her crewmates and eventually gets stranded at the darkest part of the ocean.
Tropes found in this work include:
- Anaphora: When Miri reminisces on how Leah used to be before she turned into an Empty Shell, four sentences in a row start with "I thought about".
- Bittersweet Ending: Miri realizes that Leah is an Empty Shell of her former self, and she has to accept that the Leah she knows is gone rather than keeping her decaying self around. They say goodbye for the last time when Miri lets Leah dissolve back into the ocean.
- Bumper Sticker: Juna drives Jelka's car, which has Christian-themed bumper stickers such as "Would You Follow Jesus This Close?" Juna doesn't like them and is hoping to scrape them off.
- Came Back Wrong: While the book doesn't elaborate on what exactly caused Leah to be this way, she comes back from an undersea expedition with her body and mindset changed. In particular, her skin gets a more fluid and silvery texture. She spends much of her time sitting in the bathtub at home, is very quiet and mostly talks about the ocean, and is essentially an Empty Shell with little of what Miri loved about her in the first place.
- Central Theme: The hardest part of Moving Beyond Bereavement isn't the initial loss. It's the feeling of isolation that comes with accepting your loved one's absence from your life, and how the people who support you will eventually move on before you have. At that point, the only thing you can do is let go of the memories and move on.Juna: I think that the thing about losing someone isn't the loss but the absence of afterward. D'you know what I mean? The endlessness of that. [...] My friends were sad, people who knew my sister were sad, but everyone moves on after a month. It's all they can manage. It doesn't mean they weren't sad, just that things kept going or something, I don't know. [...] It's hard when you look up and realize that everyone's moved off and left you in that place by yourself. Like they've all gone on and you're there still, holding on to this person you're supposed to let go of.
- Closed Circle: Half of the story consists of Leah's voyage in a submarine which had its power cut out and dropped to the bottom of the ocean. The crew has enough food and water to survive, there isn't anything dangerous outside, and the sub is in good condition; they just can't drive it or communicate with the surface world. It leads to both their physical and mental health deteriorating.
- Developing Doomed Characters: There's something clearly wrong with Leah from the moment the story starts, and much of Miri's plot focuses on Miri losing her grip on her wife as Leah's body and mind degenerate further. The story still develops Leah with flashbacks to her childhood, her job at the aquarium, some of her memories with Miri, and a full subplot about what happened leading up to the fateful encounter on the expedition.
- Faith–Heel Turn: The devout Catholic Jelka is on the submarine trip. While being stuck at the bottom of the sea, she begins hearing "voices" in her head that neither Leah nor Matteo can hear. This drives her so mad that she eventually escapes through the airlock, dying. Considering that Leah hears similar voices when she stares at Jelka's statue of Saint Brendan after her death, it's likely connected to this.
- Family Theme Naming: Siblings Juna and Jelka.
- Fingore: When he was younger, Matteo went on an ice fishing trip with his dad and got two of his fingers bitten off by the fish. He didn't let his dad know because he was having so much fun on the trip and didn't want to leave early.
- Foreshadowing: Throughout the book, Leah spends an increasingly long time sitting in the bathtub, and Miri starts giving her saltwater to drink. At the end, Leah's body loses form and starts degenerating into a more watery form, suggesting this was necessary to sustain her.
- Forum Speak: Miri comes across a roleplay forum where users pretends their husbands have been sent away to space. She notes that it includes abbreviations like "EB" (earthbound) and "CBW" (Came Back Wrong).
- The Ghost: A constant source of noise is from Miri and Leah's upstairs neighbors and their TV that's always on. Miri notices that she's never actually met the neighbors and knows little about them, even though Leah has apparently them a few times. We never see the neighbors during the story.
- Go Mad from the Isolation: Three members of the Centre are stuck at the bottom of the ocean for an indeterminate period of time. Jelka suffers the worst on the trip, becoming obsessed with voices in her head that nobody else can initially hear. Leah also begins forgetting bits of her regular life, and grows frustrated with the utter lack of interesting things to research down there.
- How We Got Here: Miri's part of the story takes place after Leah comes back wrong from an expedition. Leah's half, spread throughout, is dedicated to showing what happened on the expedition and ends at the moment where the submarine resurfaces.
- Inkblot Test: Miri and Leah undergo an inkblot test during couples therapy. Leah just sees eyes. Miri responds with a series of random objects, stopping in the middle to remind the counselor that she's pretty sure the test was widely discredited in the 60s before continuing anyways.
- Innocently Insensitive: When Miri tries to talk to her friend Carmen about Leah, she keeps bringing up stories about her ex-boyfriend Tom. Miri gets frustrated with this because she thinks the situations aren't similar enough to be comparing, but she calms down when she realizes she never let Carmen know exactly what's been going on with Leah either.
- Moving Beyond Bereavement: While Leah isn't necessarily dead, she's an Empty Shell of her former self. Miri still tries to support her wife and wants them to be happy again, but is terrified to realize that Leah — the only person she ever genuinely loved — is too far gone. As the months pass, she muses that the hardest part of losing someone isn't accepting that they're gone, but that they're never coming back; and yet everyone seems to assume she'll just get over it.
- No Ending: We never figure out what exactly it was that Leah found underwater, except that it was a massive creature who stared at her with an eye. Leah attempts to communicate with it, then surfaces, and what caused her to turn into her modified form is never explained.
- No Full Name Given: Leah and Miri are not given a last name throughout the story. None of the characters are.
- No Name Given: Despite being mentioned a few times, Miri's mother is never given a specific name.
- The Omniscient Council of Vagueness: Miri is never able to get a good hold on The Centre, the organization Leah worked for. She tries multiple times to call it, but always gets automated messages or people who don't actually help her. Juna also recounts that she was told very little about Jelka's death.
- Sea Stories: Leah's side of the book involves her and her two crewmates being stuck in a submarine at the bottom of the ocean.
- Token Religious Teammate: The practicing Catholic Jelka is the only character to have religion be a major part of their personality. She's the only one to not make it back from the expedition.
- Transformation Horror: Leah suffers strange effects after coming back from the expedition, such as her rapidly vomiting saltwater, her skin changing to be more silver-y, and even her eye bursting.
- Trivial Title: The book is named after a line in a dream Miri has after reading a roleplay forum called "Our Husbands in Space" and refitting it to her situation. The forum is a very minor plot element and gets shut down later in the story, with Miri's dream never being mentioned again.
