Yet it was a most unlikely success. "In a way, there's no story," Junger told Sam Jemielity in a
NewCity online interview. "There's a big hole in the middle of the story, because no one can ever know what happened to that boat. As soon as they leave [port], there's almost no storyline. There's no dialogue, there's no thoughts; it's all conjecture." Resisting temptations to fictionalize his account, Junger stuck to the facts, as understated as they might be, and to information gleaned from interviews with the survivors of other fishing boats that weathered the largest waves ever recorded in the Atlantic.
Junger saw his book initially as something that would appeal to a small audience, perhaps only a local one at that, for it was largely set in the fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. "It didn't have 'bestseller' written on it," Junger explained to Ellen Barry in an interview for the Providence Phoenix."I didn't want to invent dialogue or fictionalize or any of the stuff that readers love. I was sure I was condemned to write a journalistically interesting book that wouldn't fly.
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