1KHO 816: Trapped Inside Someone Else's Dream | Suzanne Heywood, Wavewalker

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
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Welcome to 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich and I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. And I had just read one of the most incredible books I've ever read.
Such a page-turner, I could hardly believe it was real. The book is called Wavewalker, A Memoir of Breaking Free. And author Suzanne Heywood, who has written several other books and a new one coming out as well. International best-selling author. Suzanne, welcome. Thanks for joining us.

**Suzanne Heywood** (1:42)
Thank you so much. Delighted to be here.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:45)
I was wondering, just to kick it off, you know, this is a memoir of your childhood, of your childhood where you're, you know, on this sort of never-ending voyage. It is just shocking. You know, I'm a mother. You read the book and you're just shocked. You know, you just keep turning the pages, turning the pages. Is it hard to talk about? Like, you know, we write a book, then people want you to go on all these interviews.

**Suzanne Heywood** (2:09)
No, actually, and what was really helpful is having written the book, it enabled me to process what happened when I was a kid. And actually, now it's much, much easier to talk about it, because I feel like I've got it all kind of much more sorted out in my head than I did for a long time.
But I'm a mom as well. I have three kids and I find it just as astonishing kind of looking back. I mean, even more so now I'm a mom myself, I just can't comprehend the decisions that my parents made.

**Ginny Yurich** (2:43)
Yeah, astonishing, shocking. So can you give an overview? This is a story and I loved how you put it at some point in the book, you talked about being stuck in someone else's dream.
And I thought, oh gosh, you leave with these existential questions of, what is the responsibility of a parent? How do you balance your own dreams and vision for your own life once you've had children, versus what the kids need? So can you talk about this as, it seems like a really short of simple thing, relatable in this day and age because I think people do sometimes sell everything they own and live in a camper bus or for a year.
They'll travel around the United States or they'll do it in another country. They go for a year and they come back. And that's what this was supposed to be. You're a little girl, early elementary school and your dad has this vision of going on a boat for a year.

**Suzanne Heywood** (3:35)
Exactly.

**Ginny Yurich** (3:36)
And then it just turns out to not be that.

**Suzanne Heywood** (3:38)
Exactly. So my father basically said, I want to sail around the world.
It's going to take three years to sail around the world. And then you're going to come back. And we're going to set sail when you're seven. So you'll be back by the time you're 10 Everything will go back to normal. You know, you've got to leave everything behind. So that meant leaving my dog behind, leaving my, you know, my, you know, my treasure is my biggest treasure being my doll's house, all my friends, leaving everything behind to go on my father's big adventure of sailing around the world. And he wanted to sail around the world to follow Captain Cook. My maiden name is Cook.