Image: Razvan Narcis Ticu via Unsplash
Amy Liptrot’s evocative memoir, The Outrun, tells the story of the author’s powerful rediscovery of the Orkney Islands and of sobriety. Growing up on a farm on the Mainland of Orkney, Liptrot had a dysfunctional upbringing. Her father suffered intense periods of mental ill-health and her mother was a member of a strict religious sect. Their lives centred around ‘the outrun’ that stretched from her parents’ farm down to the coast. The outrun is a vast expanse of wild, fallow hillside where animals roam: a meeting-place for wilderness and domesticity. It represents a transitional space both physically and metaphorically within Liptrot’s life and memoir.
Following her parents’ split and the following the call of a more vibrant and loud life beyond Orkney, Liptrot uproots herself from her rural upbringing and embeds herself in the hustle and bustle of London. Liptrot’s everyday begins to feel “like the perpetual last day of a festival” as her party lifestyle draws her into the clutch of alcoholism. Of her time in London, Liptrot writes an honest, visceral and yet un-sensationalised tale recalling the losses and isolation of her downwards spiral. Finding herself on the brink of devastation, and after numerous failed attempts to kick her habit, she returns to Orkney in search of solace.
Just as the driftwood, shells and nets wash up on the shores, Liptrot finds herself “washed up” and thrown back into the islands. Her complex relationship with her identity and addiction is mimicked by the complexity of her relationship with home and the space it occupies. Having left Orkney in search of a rich and vibrant life only to experience isolation and anonymity, Liptrot finds herself rediscovering the rich wilderness of the Orkney Islands. Liptrot has a phenomenal ability to dissect her environment, to intimately engage with the nature she plants herself in and beautifully carve analogies between her herself and her surroundings.
As stone by stone she rebuilds the walls on her father’s farm, she piece by piece rebuilds her life. Her intimate connection with the landscape is palpable and felt even more poignantly when she moves from the Mainland to Papa Westray, an island with a population of 70, to pursue conversation work for the RSPB. Having taken her body to the edge of despair she now takes it to the furthest edge of Scotland: to a tiny cottage nestled on a hillside, spending her evenings listening to birdsong. Her wild-swims in the North Sea not only act to cleanse her body but to refresh her mind. Emersion within earth’s elements soothes Liptrot, grounds her, in her journey towards sobriety and content. The Outrun is a phenomenal piece of both nature writing and memoir. Liptrot effortlessly entwines the genres in her transitional tale of a human battle salved by an immersion with nature, her home and her writing.
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