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Summary
Summary
When Amy Liptrot returns to Orkney after more than a decade away, she is drawn back to the Outrun on the sheep farm where she grew up. Approaching the land that was once home, memories of her childhood merge with the recent events that have set her on this journey.
Amy was shaped by the cycle of the seasons, birth and death on the farm, and her father's mental illness, which were as much a part of her childhood as the wild, carefree existence on Orkney. But as she grew up, she longed to leave this remote life. She moved to London and found herself in a hedonistic cycle. Unable to control her drinking, alcohol gradually took over. Now thirty, she finds herself washed up back home on Orkney, standing unstable at the cliff edge, trying to come to terms with what happened to her in London.
Spending early mornings swimming in the bracingly cold sea, the days tracking Orkney's wildlife--puffins nesting on sea stacks, arctic terns swooping close enough to feel their wings--and nights searching the sky for the Merry Dancers, Amy slowly makes the journey toward recovery from addiction.
The Outrun is a beautiful, inspiring book about living on the edge, about the pull between island and city, and about the ability of the sea, the land, the wind, and the moon to restore life and renew hope.
A Guardian Best Nonfiction Book of 2016
Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller
New Statesman Book of the Year
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
When Liptrot leaves rehab in London, she returns to her Orkney childhood home, the interior and exterior landscapes of which she maps in this spectacular memoir. Winds lash the land, sometimes moving tons of rock, as Liptrot weathers her cravings. On an island where the map can be "altered in the morning," Liptrot remembers her drunken buzz through London. Descriptions of millennial city life are sorrowfully precise: "Years went by in a blur of waiting for the weekend, or for my article to be published, or for the hangover to end." Later, she wonders, "Had all my life been leading up to doing Kundalini yoga with a bunch of pissheads... in various states of... mental anguish on an institutional carpet?" And yet, transcendence follows. She drives Orkney at night listening for threatened birds. She searches for a fata morgana, marvels at seals, but nevertheless wonders-why bother when one can "watch nature documentaries on YouTube?" Even with "twenty tabs open,", this magnificent memoir is a record of transformation in its truest sense-what it means to leave behind the tabs for experience. Orkney legends tell of seals changing into humans, but, here, Liptrot is the shape-shifter, peeling off her wetsuit like blubber after snorkeling in the ice-cold sea. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Tales that show we can start afresh are what we need at this time of year - so Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun, shares her favourites Tales of recovery and of new beginnings - from Cinderella to A Christmas Carol or Matt Haig's recent bestseller Reasons to Stay Alive - are powerfully attractive. They lead us to believe that we can make things afresh and, at the start of a new year, that is what we need. I had a baby last Christmas and subsequently much of my reading over the year has been about becoming a parent. Memoirs by Rachel Cusk, Anne Enright and Rivka Galchen all have passages of insight and identification but the best was Expecting by Scottish journalist Chitra Ramaswamy, on pregnancy, her own and in literature. She's a beautiful writer and this book - which moves from an Edinburgh loo, through Sylvia Plath and Susan Sontag, to the Hebrides, to Anna Karenina, to the birthing pool and operating theatre - was my treasured companion in the early secretive days of pregnancy; it reassured me that you can make the move into motherhood without losing your intellect. I'll be giving copies to expectant friends. The other excellent parenting title I read was psychologist Charles Fernyhough's The Baby in the Mirror, in which he closely observes the first three years of his daughter's life and combines this with what is known scientifically about child development. I particularly enjoyed a deconstruction of a game of I-spy, characteristically forensic as well as affectionate. I only came to the Patrick Melrose novels, the first of which were published in the 1990s, after watching the excellent 2018 TV adaptation, but Never Mind by Edward St Aubyn is brilliant: he has such a singular voice - terrifying and piercingly funny. I'm fascinated with the shadows that childhood can cast, explored in this case through the abuse of Melrose, a cipher for St Aubyn. It shows how the building blocks of a personality are laid and has an unbeatable ear for the particular wrong-headed attitudes and monstrous characters of its upper-class setting - laced with a complicated affection for them. Another novel, more recently published, is All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison, set in 1933 in a rural East Anglian community, looking at what led to the beginning of the second world war. "Farming, folklore and fascism" is how the author herself flippantly describes it. It is precise and moving on agricultural practices and tradition, and the natural world, including a subplot about the endangered corncrake. Protagonist Edie is at the beginning of adulthood and negotiating her choices, with temptation from the glamorous Constance FitzAllen, a dangerously alluring character. In 2019 I will celebrate eight years sober. In The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath, Leslie Jamison, one of the most accomplished and challenging essayists around, explores the topic at (quite some) length. It is not your average recovery memoir - it takes a step back and examines dominating narratives of addiction and recovery and the myth of the tortured artist. Anyone considering using the new year as a prompt to change their drinking habits will find much to consider here. Jamison fights, as I have, to write about what comes after getting sober - not the drunken backstory but the reality of a positive new start: "I'd always been enthralled by stories of wreckage. But I wanted to know if stories about getting better could ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart. I needed to believe they could." - Amy Liptrot.
Kirkus Review
After a decade in London, a troubled woman returns home to a rural island in northern Scotland, hoping to heal.Liptrot begins with the harrowing details of her birth. When she was just hours old, her mother rode a wheelchair down the runway of an airport and placed her in the lap of her straightjacket-clad father, who was to be airlifted to a mental hospital on the mainland. It's a fitting introduction to the chronicle of a life plagued with hardship. The author grew up on a farm high on the cliffs of Orkney: "nothing but cliffs and ocean between it and Canada." Her parents were outsiders from England who had come to the insular island to start anew, and they were an odd pairan evangelical Christian and a bipolar schizophrenic. Liptrot longed to escape and eventually did, to London. Of course, the pain didn't disappear; she found herself covering it up with destructive behavior: drugs, alcohol, and meaningless sex. As she writes, "my life was rough and windy and tangled." Bookstores are packed with countless addiction memoirs, and there are also plenty that see a prodigal son or daughter coming home to slay his or her demons. What makes Liptrot's book different is the otherworldly setting. When she returned to the Orkneys, she immersed herself in nature, taking long walks around her family's wind-swept land, early-morning swims in the frigid cold Atlantic Ocean, watching the northern lights from an old theater in the middle of town, and tracking the flocks of birds coming down from the Arctic. Eventually, Liptrot found peace and began to imagine a kind of future she had never before thought possible. She also includes a glossary to define such terms as "haar" (sea fog) and "kirk" (church). An ordinary addiction memoir set in an extraordinary placeworth reading for the descriptions of life on a "beautiful, barely touched stretch of land." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* While this memoir is built on common themes small-town girl, desperate to escape to the big city, lands herself in trouble they're just scaffolding. Liptrot's home is the windblown Orkney Islands off the northeast coast of Scotland, a place both easy and difficult to escape. After too many years of hard drinking and partying in London, and too many wrecked relationships, she finally admits that she is an alcoholic and returns home. It feels like failure at first, but gradually Liptrot finds a way to live sober and appreciate things she once fled. She reconnects with her divorced parents, mentally ill father and evangelical Christian mother, both of whom still live on the island. Liptrot is clear-eyed when she describes the great emptiness left after giving up alcohol and why the temptations to start drinking again still nag at her. This may make the book sound bleak to potential readers, but it isn't. Whether she writes of walking along the wind-scoured coasts or taking polar-bear dips in the icy waters, her prose is spare, lean, and beautiful, much like the country about which she writes.--Curbow, Joan Copyright 2017 Booklist