Lucy Irvine

The author and narrator of the memoir Castaway, Lucy was born in 1956 in London, where she was raised in comfort by a Scottish father and English mother. Lucy had a privileged childhood filled with piano lessons and horseback riding, and she suggests that she was raised by unconventional parents, who do not prevent her from dropping out of school at age 15 to work as a monkey keeper at a local zoo. Lucy’s own free-spiritedness and independence is further evidenced by the world travels she undertakes at a young age, referencing in Castaway a backpacking trip through Europe as well as a time stranded in Israel’s Negev desert. At one point in Castaway, Lucy flashes forward some months into the future when she is on a yacht in the Mediterranean Sea, all details which point to the wanderlust and adventurousness that define her character.

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