The Shape of the Wake: A Memoir

No land. No lights. No sound beyond the quiet rhythm of water against the hull.Lane Harlan had spent forty years making his mark, on Wall Street, in Newark’s housing projects, in boardrooms and the kind of rooms where important people make important decisions. He had built a nonprofit that served over two hundred thousand homeless and incarserated. He had made money, lost it, and made it again. A husband and a father and, by most measures, a success.And then, at seventy, he looked at the wake behind him, that pale trail of disturbed water already smoothing itself back into nothing, and understood that he was not finished.The Shape of the Wake begins with a young boys dream.Fifty years later the dream becomes reality with the purchase of a fifty-seven-foot sloop named Corsair and a decision that most people in Lane’s life considered somewhere between brave and insane: to sail around the world. It travels through the phosphorescent waters of the Atlantic, the ancient villages of the Marquesas, the coral atolls of the South Pacific, and the long, quiet watches of the open ocean.But this is not simply a sailing book. It is a memoir about the things we carry across the water with us, a daughter discovered late, a marriage tested and deepened, a father’s long shadow, a city’s broken streets, and the way the sea has of returning everything to its proper place.Written with the candor of a man who has run out of reasons to be anything but honest, The Shape of the Wake asks the question most of us are afraid to answer: if you still could, would you?“For most of my life, I thought the wake was the point. The deals closed. The money made. The impression left behind. I thought those were the markers of a life well lived. The ocean taught me otherwise.”Lane Harlan is a former Wall Street broker, real estate developer, and founder of Urban Renewal Corp. He completed a full circumnavigation aboard Corsair with the World ARC in 2026. The Shape of the Wake is his first book. Read more