The Sunday Story: A Life Worthy of Whalefall

So I love horror fiction, it's my favorite genre. Anything with monsters or zombies or dead people coming back to life, I'm into it. I also love a good thriller.

So Daniel Crouse had been on my radar for a while. He's a New York Times bestselling author who has written some pretty scary books. When I heard he had a book coming out this summer called Whale Fall, I was intrigued. You know, I'm like, What is this going to be about?

This book, it's not necessarily horror, although the situation is horrific, but it's definitely a thriller. If I wanted to sum it up, I would say. It's about a scuba diver who is swallowed by a whale, and he has to figure out how to escape before his oxygen runs out. That over-the-top premise was more than enough to draw me in. But when you actually read the book, it's really about so much more. It's about a father and a son, and the legacies fathers leave behind.

It's about what we carry with us and what we let go. When I talked to Daniel Crouse back in August, just as the book was coming out, I got a sense of how significant this book was to him. A whale fall in nature is a death of an incredible creature, a whale, but then that death provides for many other life forms. And it is a huge event. In the ocean, Daniel was wrestling with what it means to have a meaningful life and a meaningful death, a whale fall. His sister was dying and he spoke openly about that.

Since our interview, she has passed away, and I offer my deepest condolences to him and his family.

This conversation has stayed with me. What does it mean to live a life that is worthy of a whale fall? What does it mean to live a life that is worthy of the people we leave behind?

But what it really does is it creates life, and it creates centuries worth of life because of its decomposition. And I thought it was kind of a beautiful metaphor for what the book is about. In that. There are good deaths and there's bad deaths, and the best death of all, I think is when you can die. And your death means something to others. Whether that's you're passing along something biological, you've got a family, you're leaving behind art, you know, in my case, maybe it's books, or you just touched people in some way, you know, the best death for all of us is for us to become whale falls.

It is definitely a thriller. Like, how did you go about planning, the writing for this and the structure of this?

And really, that came not from me having some brilliant idea about how to structure, but came from the reality of what the diver was going through and how. When you're in these kind of situations as a diver, well, not. Not many divers can fit in this particular situation, but any kind of stressful situation, a couple. But a stressful situation as a diver means. More importantly than even ever before is you need to breathe sleepy, as the character says in the book, you need to modulate your breathing. And so the book emulates trying to control panic with the size of its chapters.

One thing that the main character in this story, Jay, that he has, is that he. He has this wealth of knowledge about diving and about sea creatures that he got from his father, who he has a very difficult relationship with. But, like, this book is full of information like, Are you a diver yourself? How did you? how did you learn all of this?

Really is the opposite of the old adage, right? What? You know? I knew absolutely nothing about whales, I knew nothing about diving, knew very little about the ocean.

So I was starting with nothing, you know. Like, usually, when I start a book, I've got an idea of a plot and then I'll kind of research to kind of fill in the gaps. But with this, you know, there were, there are no books about this. So I had to front load the process with about three months of intense interviews with whale scientists and diving experts. And during that process, I was sort of like the diver inside the whale.

And I was shining a flashlight at this part of the stomach and saying, What is this? what does it feel like? what does it smell like? What's over here? What happens if I tug on this?

And it was like taking a college class in advanced whales, I guess.

I would say it could be male, but I guess it doesn't have to be gender. How that relationship with the parent can weigh someone down in such an incredible way.

I want it to be something that was simple and everyone could understand. And the simplest relationship is the first one we have, which is child and parent.

Yes, Jay and his father have a troubled relationship, you know, Mitt was a man of the sea, a local diving legend, but also the kind of guy who couldn't hold down a job and felt sort of emasculated by his domestic life. And just wanted to be out in the sea. And he wanted to mold Jay in his image, and Jay didn't want that, and so he was sort of kicking and screaming drug along to all these diving exploits.

And you know, they ultimately, through some terrible things that the father did, became estranged. And so Jay leaves home for a year, and that's when Mitt gets cancer and dies, and Jay never sees him, never visits him on his deathbed. So when Jay is swallowed, he begins, you know? Under the influence of the methane in the whale stomach, and the injury. And the panic begins to conflate the whale with his father, almost as if the whale is his father. So the book becomes one of reconciliation, that the father and the son have to sort of reconcile the regrets of how they treated each other.

If Jay has any chance of getting out. Because the dad was the keeper of all the knowledge, and he told that knowledge, he gave that knowledge to Jay. But Jay purposely tried to forget it as kind of a screw you to his dad. And now he's got to make amends if he's going to survive.

As because it does seem like Jay does seem to come to the realization. There were good moments with his father, but there were a lot of bad moments with his father. Does reconciliation mean forgiveness? Does it mean letting go?

Does it mean accepting?

And can we, when the chips are down, and particularly when life is ending, can we show mercy? It's a complicated, thorny issue and I don't think it ever fully gets resolved, and I don't. But how could I resolve it? You know, it's been an issue since the beginning of time.

Then he got swallowed by a whale. He gets inside the whale, he prays, he repents, and then he spat out, and he goes and does what the Lord wanted him to do.

Is that a correct reading of that?

So much of human society is built upon it.

So, you know, when you write a book like this, you have to be aware of the touchstones people are going to have.

It's not required whatsoever. But to me, Book of Jonah was about second chances, and it was about this quality of truth versus mercy. And sort of. More importantly, I really, you know, this whale is not jaws.

You know, the whale in the book is not nefarious, it's not a man-eater. Whales would never purposely eat a human. The whale, as I envisioned, it, was something very benevolent and, in fact, kind of godlike.

You know, whales, sperm whales are so interesting because they're mammals. They will dive down 10,000 feet deep and yet they have to keep coming up the whales to breathe. And I kept on seeing that visual of them going from the abyssal deep to the surface. As almost like an elevator between worlds. And almost, you know, for Mitt, the ocean is heaven.

And the whales are sort of angels, and so when the whale sort of becomes Mitt, it starts a whole new cycle of sort of spiritualism. In the book, even though Mitt himself was professed to be very anti-religious. But he had a religion his religion was the ocean, his spiritualism was the ocean.

And you know, he says in the book, what we're all looking for, whether it's from God or from nature, what we're all searching for are moments of awe. You know, we're all trying to find this feeling of being small, and sort of counterintuitively, by feeling small, it allows you to recognize the existence of something big. And that's essentially religion, in a way.

We're back with the Sunday story. We're listening to a conversation I had with Daniel Krause about his new book, Whale Fall. This is all about fathers and sons. Did you draw from your own personal relationship with your father for this story, or from, you know, your relationship with your parents or a family member?

There's a seed of it there, for sure.

It was, it was more that I was drawing from things happening around me at the time. Like, I'm 48, you know, I'm at that age where people I know are starting to die. You know? Just in the last few months, I've had a good friend die, and my father-in-law died, and my sister is dying right now. Oh my gosh.

And, you know, being swallowed by whether it's your parents or the life that you've lived and the regrets that you have, you know. And being in this moment, whether that's slowly dying in a bed or dying inside the belly of a whale, you are at this moment. There comes a time where we have to, there's nowhere else to turn and we have to look into ourselves. And, you know, determined. Have we lived a good life? have we lived a life worthy of whale fall? You know, these are, these are all.

They're all mixed up, you know, and that's and I, and I like that in a way, I like that. These ideas get kind of jumbled up inside of a thriller narrative, you know, because I think it deepens it and it complicates it. And you know, I think when people read this book, what they're expecting is a real time breakneck thriller. And it is that I think what they're not expecting is how moving it's going to be.

I've had so many reactions where people tell me they read the book and they loved it, but they didn't expect to be crying by the end of it. And that was the risk and the appeal for me of writing the book, to try to see if I could do all that at once.

Do you think that there is a way that you can allow the past to stay the past, or that what is buried should stay buried? That sometimes we're going looking for closure. As Jay kept, you know, kind of saying in air quotes, Yeah, and and that's not there, that doesn't exist.

It was pointless. He is his father's remains, and we are all the remains of our parents. The search, sometimes is, is just looking inward and just having the courage to accept who we are. Our faults, you know, our regrets, and having the courage to stare them in the face. And you know, it's that happens to a lot of us when we're at the end of our lives, I think.

But it's maybe healthier and a good practice to do that a little bit while we're still up and kicking.

I'm Aisha Roscoe up first is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week until then, have a great rest of your weekend.