On the morning that his father, Navy deep-sea diver Mac Macoby, dies of a heart attack, 12-year-old Robert is engulfed by the memories that tie them together. The memories come in fragments, some broken, some incomplete, but together they form the portrait of a man shaped by the tides of history, not a hero’s life but a heroic one, nonetheless. Diver is about one California family in the 1960s, and about every family, a novel about the rigors of military life amid the turbulence of the counterculture movement, a novel of how memory can fail us, serve us, and support us through loss.

“My family was never far from the ocean.” 

Lewis Buzbee. Diver. Palmetto Publishing, 2024. Donated by the author to the Sea Library ❤️

My interview with Lewis in the Sea Library Notebook

Lewis Buzbee’s “Letter to the Sea”

Photos by Anna Iltnere / Sea Library