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WORK TITLE: The Outrun
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://amyliptrot.tumblr.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: British
http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Author.aspx?id=4294992790 * http://www.elle.com/culture/books/interviews/a44741/amy-liptrot-the-outrun-interview/ *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1982, in Orkney, Scotland.
EDUCATION:Attended University of Edinburgh.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Orkney Today, writer. Edinburgh Student newspaper, editor. Worked formerly as a music journalist.
AVOCATIONS:Surveying corncrake birds for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Stone wall building. Swimming in the ocean.
AWARDS:Wainwright Prize for The Outrun, 2016.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Amy Liptrot is a Scottish writer and journalist. She grew up on the northeastern coast of Scotland and studied literature at the University of Edinburgh. Following graduation she moved to London to pursue her dream of working as a music journalist. During this time, she began drinking heavily. Her alcoholism led to the loss of jobs as well as the destruction of relationships. Liptrot began going to AA on and off for five years before committing to treatment. After becoming sober, she moved back to Orkney, where she grew up, to live with her parents and work on her novel. In addition to being a novelist, Liptrot writes for Orkney Today and is an editor for Edinburgh Student newspaper.
The Outrun was first published in the UK in 2016, for which it was awarded a Wainwright Prize. It was published in the U.S. in 2017. The memoir documents Liptrot’s recovery from alcoholism, placing large focus on the life she builds after getting sober.
The book opens in Liptrot’s childhood on a farm on the cliffs of Orkney. The reader is quickly introduced to the dysfunctions in her family. Immediately following Liptrot’s birth, her father boards a plane in a straightjacket, to be sent to a mental hospital on the mainland after a schizophrenic episode. Liptrot’s mother, an evangelical Christian, introduces her to the theatrical extremes of evangelical Christianity, while her father, a bipolar schizophrenic, has psychotic breaks. In one such episode, he smashes all of the windows in the family house and hides from the Police with Liptrot in her bedroom.
In her teens, Liptrot is eager to leave the small town behind, and finds a livelier life in London. It is there that her alcoholism takes hold. Liptrot writes about leaving parties to find bars with faster service, losing romantic partners that refused to put up with her drinking, and being assaulted in the night. After a handful of attempts at getting clean, Liptrot finally commits to a treatment plan. After getting sober, she returns to her family’s home in quiet Orkney. Instead of yearning for the party life of London, she finds solace and familiarity in the extremes of the landscape. “She describes a sense of omniscience granted by the simultaneous tracking of ships, pods of orcas, weather and aircraft,” wrote Horatio Clare in Spectator. Liptrot finds new purpose in the meditative acts of bird watching and building stone walls, while finding her highs in swimming in the frigid sea.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2017, Joan Curbow, review of The Outrun, p. 28.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2017, review of The Outrun.
New Statesman, January 22, 2016, Ben Myers, “Little Earthquakes,” p. 45.
Publishers Weekly, January 9, 2017, review of The Outrun. p. 54.
Spectator, January 23, 2016, Horatio Clare, “Drying out in the Orkneys,” p. 36.*
Many Addiction Memoirs End With the Writer in Rehab—But What Happens Afterwards?
For journalist Amy Liptrot, the answer is: Live on a remote Scottish island and count birds.
BY LAURA SNAPES
APR 25, 2017
A month ago—on the Spring Equinox—Amy Liptrot celebrated six years since her last drink. "I quite enjoyed that my sobriety is tied in with the cosmos, just to be a bit megalomaniacal about it," says the 35-year-old, calling from her home in Hebden Bridge, in north-west England. To mark the occasion, she swam "in a bitterly cold reservoir at the top of a hill, because that's what I do for kicks." Plunging into freezing water is a pretty unusual hobby—she's part of a group that swims every Saturday morning no matter what the weather—but it has been a key part of Liptrot's ongoing recovery from alcoholism.
Released in the UK last year (and the US today), Liptrot's acclaimed memoir, The Outrun, documents her chaotic twenties in London, and a subsequent return to her native Orkney, the archipelago of remote islands off Scotland's north coast. (The title refers to a long stretch of cliffs on her windy home isle.)
Liptrot had read many addiction memoirs, but found they mostly ended with the author entering rehab. She wanted to write about what happens after you get sober, she says: "That's just the beginning of the story." For Liptrot, that meant changing up her surroundings, using the stark Orkney backdrop to help her try to pinpoint her alcoholism's root cause. The Outrun contains unflinching interrogation of her self-destructive impulses, but also sharp observations about the metaphysical qualities of her surroundings: London's 24-hour bodegas are "fluorescent oases in the shut-down city," while back in Orkney, she studies the stars, noting that she has "swapped disco lights for celestial lights."
In her teens, Liptrot bristled against the island's limits—the confining cliffs and vanishing horizon known in local mythology as Hether Blether. She left to study literature in Edinburgh, then settled in London to pursue teenage dreams of working as a music journalist. "I wanted to rub the city onto my skin; I wanted to inhale the streets," she writes after one euphoric night. But alcoholism quickly kills the romance. She loses job after job, and hides her bottles from a beloved boyfriend, who leaves. One night, she quits a party to go and drink faster than the rounds are coming. On another night, she sustains a violent assault.
Amy Liptrot
LISA SWARNA KHANNA
"I thought I could handle it," she tells me. "I thought I was big enough and clever enough to be able to take drugs, and hand in articles, and balance it all, and for quite a long time, I did." The hedonism that raged in mid-2000s London didn't help. "I was thinking recently about Amy Winehouse," says Liptrot. "It was at the time when she was around London, and I was collecting headlines about her—stuff like 'Amy: Headed For Collapse'—and pinning them to my fridge thinking it was a big joke because she had the same name as me. People used to joke about that a lot. Getting into a horrible state was not really analyzed."
But Liptrot knew that drinking alone and hiding the evidence "wasn't quite normal." Eventually, comments from other people got her to Alcoholics Anonymous, though it took four or five years of on-and-off attendance before she sought proper help. Doctors then referred her to a government-funded treatment program. Once she completed it, Liptrot moved back to Orkney.
"I THOUGHT I WAS BIG ENOUGH AND CLEVER ENOUGH TO BE ABLE TO TAKE DRUGS, AND HAND IN ARTICLES, AND BALANCE IT ALL"
"I've washed up on this island again, nine months sober, worn down and scrubbed clean, like a pebble," she writes. In search of purpose, she builds stone walls on her parents' farm, and takes a position surveying rare corncrake birds for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. "Building a wall, you're returning to the same place over and over, and you can see the changes in weather and wildlife and seasons," she says. "It slows you down and roots you to place. And it might have been that I was looking for one particular type of bird, but actually I discovered a whole lot more."
West coast of Mainland Island, Orkney Islands
Mainland Island, in the Orkney Islands
GETTY
Indeed, The Outrun is slow and lyrical, transitioning from the rush of drinking into the raw sensations of island life. Liptrot describes the community and natural history of the islands, but took care to avoid a narrative of the big bad city versus the healing island. "Addiction is just as prevalent in rural places as it is in urban places, and it's something that's in you psychologically rather than being created by location," she says.
One thing that the location has afforded her is a new kind of high to chase. Liptrot had an epiphany that drinking may have been her attempt to attain the manic states that she had witnessed in her father, who has bipolar disorder: "I explored how I could still strive for these more extreme experiences, but in a safer and healthier way." And now her freshwater swimming habit has taken the place of drinking sessions. "If I invite somebody to visit me, I wouldn't say, 'Let's go to the pub,'" she says. "I would say, 'Let's go to this place where the water falls into a beautiful pool, and jump into the water in the middle of winter.'"
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Liptrot is keenly aware that her sobriety, while hard won, rests on many factors. "Most people don't get sober, and most people don't remain sober. I could easily have failed despite all the advantages that I have," she says. "My family were always supportive. I have a good education, I was relatively young, I had some semblance of a career. But despite all these things, I still only just managed it, so for the people who don't have all these advantages, it's really, really hard."
The Outrun ends with Liptrot "ready to be brave." A year since its original publication, she's grown in confidence, "and realized just to have fun with it all," she says. "Also, that a book ends, but life continues—I wrote a book about my mental wobbliness and my recovery, and those things don't end. You realize that things are ongoing and relentless, and just to keep writing it."
Photo by Lisa Swarna Khanna
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Amy Liptrot
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Amy Liptrot received the Wainwright Prize for The Outrun, which was also shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize. As well as writing for local newspaper, Orkney Today, and editing the Edinburgh Student newspaper, she has worked as an artist’s model, a trampolinist, and in a shellfish factory.
The Outrun
Joan Curbow
Booklist.
113.13 (Mar. 1, 2017): p28.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Outrun.
By Amy Liptrot.
Apr. 2017. 304p. Norton, $25.95 (9780393608960). 616.86.
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.--Joan Curbow
Curbow, Joan
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Curbow, Joan. "The Outrun." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 28. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA488689446&it=r&asid=2360c3d88a4744543203fb587e815efd.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A488689446
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506813164067 2/3
Liptrot, Amy: THE OUTRUN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Liptrot, Amy THE OUTRUN Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $25.95 4, 25 ISBN: 978-0-393-60896-0
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 pair--an 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 place--worth reading for the descriptions of life on a "beautiful, barely touched stretch of land."
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Liptrot, Amy: THE OUTRUN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480921847&it=r&asid=7228ee091337ba05f77326e9580dd34a.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480921847
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506813164067 3/3
The Outrun
Publishers Weekly.
264.2 (Jan. 9, 2017): p54.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Abstract:
* The Outrun Amy Liptrot. Norton, $25.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-393-60896-0
Full Text:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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: "Yeats 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 piss-heads ... 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.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Outrun." Publishers Weekly, 9 Jan. 2017, p. 54+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477339327&it=r&asid=ce9eaac85cc1a0ef65670b3ac7674f88.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477339327
Drying out in the Orkneys
Horatio Clare
Spectator. 330.9778 (Jan. 23, 2016): p36.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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The Outrun
by Amy Liptrot
Canongate, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 304, ISBN 9781782115472
Spectator Bookshop, 12.75 [pounds sterling]
'If I were to go mad,' Amy Liptrot writes in her memoir of alcoholism and the Orkneys, 'It would come as no surprise at all.' One surprise of this book is its sanity, which is remarkable, given Liptrot's beginnings.
We open, unforgettably, with her parents passing each other on an island runway. Her mother is being flown home from hospital, holding the newborn Amy; her father, in the grip of a manic episode and a strait jacket, is heading the other way. Liptrot recalls another fit which drove him to smash all the windows of the family farm and hide with her, aged 11, from the police and doctors. 'As his sedatives kicked in I crouched with my father in a corner of my bedroom, sharing a banana. "You are my girl," he said.' Liptrot leaves us shivering at the implications.
Her mother joins an evangelical church, exposing the young girl to the theatrics of charismatic preachers and their totalitarian take on the devil and masturbation. If home is intense, things are wild outdoors. The Orkneys enjoy winds so strong that in 1952 they plucked 70,000 chickens into oblivion and had 'tethered cows flying in the air like kites'.
Everything below their largest island, 'the mainland', is 'south' to Orcadians; Liptrot flees to a London which is mostly a purgatorial Hackney. After she slips away from a party in order 'to drink alone and at a faster pace' alcoholism descends: fighting, hysterics, losing love and being subject to violent attack are described with extreme calm. Instead of dialogue (barely a dozen lines) or substantially realised characters, The Outrun presents a meditative interior journey of the kind the internet spawns in unreadable infinity, but which Liptrot elevates to an art.
Patrick Hamilton would have raised a double to her description of alcoholic neuropathy, in which the body freezes into semi-paralysis, and a second to her self-portait in London, through which we gain a sense of intensely lonely generations split between dowdy realities and cybereal dreams. 'Wherever I am, I spend most of my time with a laptop online,' she writes. 'I've moved around a lot but the internet is my home.'
In the book's second strand, which sees Liptrot pass through rehab and tackle the Twelve Steps on the way back to the Orkneys, and on to the outermost of them, Papa Westray (also known as Papay), the drama shifts. Having been swept into dipsomania we now share a brittle and mighty struggle to stay dry. The islands come to the rescue. Undertaking a corncrake survey for the RSPB, Liptrot spots noctilucent clouds: 'Fifty miles high, in the deep twilight, icy blue whisps hang like lightning crossed with cotton wool. I get out of the car and hold my phone to the sky, smiling like a nutter.'
Wintering on Papay in an RSPB cottage, having made sure 'the broadband was working before the hot water', she faces the isolation of the retreatant, a much kinder sort than that of the alcoholic. While her recovery through sea swimming and clifftop walks, visions of the northern lights, the heave of island histories and the roar of their weathers make a transporting story, it is Liptrot's navigations between online and physical reality which render the book remarkable.
She writes:
I am carrying out semi-scientific studies into
myself, performing bathymetry of the soul. I
am fascinated by counting and plotting and
marking my daily activities and movements,
collecting bottomless data. I've been tracking
my sleep cycles and carrying out surveys
of my dreams. I download a menstrual-cycle
recorder and watch it sync with the moon,
waxing and waning in another window of my
browser,
and with every urge to drink fought off, this mining of herself yields ore. She describes a sense of omniscience granted by the simultaneous tracking of ships, pods of orcas, weather and aircraft. The shade of a Midas-madness of our time, whereby everything upon which the eye falls demands to be turned into information, becomes for Liptrot a shelter against the claims of the abyss. I clenched my teeth for her when she finds a bottle of vodka with one sip left in it washed up on the shore. She sniffs but does not drink. 'Is this all you've got, North Sea? I can take it. I can take anything you throw at me.'
I believed her, and salute her book for its heroic rebuff to the waves of the various dark and hectic seas which so many carry within.
Little earthquakes
Ben Myers
New Statesman. 145.5298 (Jan. 22, 2016): p45.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
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The Outrun
Amy Liptrot
Canongate, 304pp. 14.99 [pounds sterling]
In her inventive essay "Diving Into Berghain", published online last year, Amy Liptrot wrote about a night out at the notorious techno club in Berlin. Only it was actually a piece about wild sea swimming and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and the effect of loud bass (and flotation tanks) on the human body. In her debut book, The Outrun, Liptrot weaves similar webs, seamlessly linking memoir with topography, nature and a historical study of Orkney that stretches beyond the rocky archipelago, out across the oceans of time and into the cosmos.
Her story of escaping a remote sheep-farming upbringing in a locale called "the Outrun" for a life of thrills and hedonism in a sensory-overloaded, post-millennial London, followed by the almost inevitable psychic crash, subsequent spell in rehab and then slow recovery, back in the very landscape that she left, may seem familiar to anyone who has read more than one addiction memoir. Yet Liptrot refuses to wallow in self-pity, or dwell on the brutal late-night assault she survives in London (her attacker is sentenced to six years, for this and another attempted rape), and finds wonder instead in the drama of her surroundings, as if seeing them for the first time.
Here it is the poetry of the elements and observed ancient rituals that provides succour, rather than the twelve-step programme. Lambing, wall-building, swimming out to shipwrecks and watching equinox sunrises are designed both to punish and to provide pleasure, and ultimately they restore balance and aid recovery. These tough exercises ensure that landscape and body become interchangeable in Liptrot's fecund prose. High on nothing but fresh air, she writes: "My body is a continent. Forces are at work in the night. A bruxist, I grind my teeth in my sleep, like tectonic plates ... lightning strikes every time I sneeze, and when I orgasm, there's an earthquake."
Her beginnings were suitably Gothic. Liptrot's manic-depressive father's first glimpse of his daughter was beneath the whirring blades of a helicopter: straitjacketed, he was being flown off the island during an episode prompted by her birth, while her mother--now a born-again Christian and separated from her father--was being flown back in. Thirty-odd years later her father, dressed in an ever-present farmer's boiler suit, remains at the farm, to which Liptrot returns when London has become too toxic. He still suffers manic episodes now.
Liptrot oscillates between identities. Her English parents relocated to Orkney in the 1970s to work this clifftop farm fringed with "grey flagstone--sheer drops and massive slabs", where the family dog chases rabbits right off the cliff edge during a gale and booming echoes are created by waves entering unseen caves below. She does not feel fully Orcadian, or Scottish, or English (or a Londoner), yet time and distance enable her to acknowledge that she has been drawn to extremes and edges all her life from teenage experimentation with drugs to a drink-driving incident that acts as a warning sign that things have gone awry. Only now, clean and serene, does she begin to find poetry and meaning on her doorstep.
Redemption-through-nature is now a literary subgenre, and The Outrun will no doubt sit alongside Richard Mabey's Nature Cure and Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk--the sheer sensuality of Liptrot's prose and her steely resolve immediately put her right up there with the best of the best. Much of this beguiling book was written during a winter on the four-mile-long island of Papay (situated off Westray, off Orkney, it is "shaped a bit like a Wotsit, or an old man with a walking stick, vomiting") with little more than three kilos of porridge and Twitter for company. Indeed, the more isolated she becomes, the deeper Liptrot's immersion in these beguiling islands and, in turn, the greater the chance of sustained recovery. She has crossed three islands to get here and the salted sea air becomes more vital than the MDMA of her clubbing days.
Technology also plays its part in this story. Where once she left drunken messages, Liptrot's phone is now used to shape her walks, observe constellations and record the sound of the wind. Arriving at Papay's sub-zero Rose Cottage, she checks the broadband connection before the hot water supply. Climbing out of a cairn on the empty island Holm of Papa only to realise that she's in an area not charted on Google Maps, she writes: "I feel I have escaped. I am beyond the internet." The subversive joy found in this pixellated, sub-cartographical hinterland is certainly shared by this reader.
Liptrot is an Orcadian warrior with the breeze in her blood and poetry in her fingers, and The Outrun equals works by fellow islanders such as George Mackay Brown and Peter Maxwell Davies. It may even be a future classic. Wherever she journeys next, you will want to go with her.