Yacht Girl

• Main Author: Mason, Quinn
• Other Authors: Lubrin, Canisia, Thammavongsa, Souvankham
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Guelph 2023
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10214/27733

Inspired by the year I spent traveling the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and Arctic Circle as a superyacht stewardess, Yacht Girl is a bildungsroman about a young girl who follows her friend to the Caribbean to pursue a career in the yachting industry circa 2013. Told through a mix of present-day journal entries, first-person past recollections, and third-person present tense stories, the book uses the techniques of montage and collage to show the fragmentariness of a young girl’s self as she undergoes the process of emerging, becoming, and achieving identity formation. Similar to the disconnect between what people post on social media vs. their lived reality, images from the protagonist’s social media feed are also woven throughout the prose text, offering a meditation on the difficulty of balancing lived experience with the act of artistic creation and narrativization—i.e., the way we tell our own story to others and ourselves. 2999-01-01