Ep 6: Adam and Eve Crusoe
7/7/202659 min
When Lucy Irvine stumbles on an ad in the back of a magazine—an eccentric writer is looking for a “wife” to join him on a tropical island—she thinks she’s found the adventure of a lifetime. But the survival you sign up for is not necessarily the survival you end up in…
To learn more about this story, I recommend the book Castaway by Lucy Irvine. There are other sources, as listed in the episode, but I don’t recommend them!
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsBlair Braverman· Host0:00
She's reading a magazine and she sees an ad in the back. It says, writer seeks wife for year on tropical island. Welcome back to What to Carry, What to Burn. I'm Blair Braverman. I'm a writer, an adventurer, and a long-distance dog sledder. And today's story is pretty different. I've actually gotten a lot of listener requests for this one. I want to give a heads up that the story has some pretty adult topics. It's not kid-friendly. There's a lot about sex, and it includes some verbal and sexual abuse, although I don't and will never linger on the details of those things. Today, we're going to meet two people who chose to put themselves into a survival situation with no way out. But the survival you think you're choosing is not always the survival you end up in. Let's jump in. We meet a girl named Lucy Irvine. who was born in 1956 in a small town in England and has a really rough childhood. She has trouble at home. She escapes that by dropping out of school at age 13, and she works some pretty rough jobs to get by. She becomes a monkey keeper, like a literal monkey keeper at the zoo. She's a topless waitress, a nude model, a house cleaner. She has some pretty traumatic experiences during this time, as you might imagine,