THE OUTRUN AMY LIPTROT IN SOUTH AFRICA

 The Outrun Amy Liptrot   Amy Liptrot begins her memoir with a glossary: In the Orkney Islands of far northern Scotland, seals are called  selkies; cattle are  kye; and the fog rolling in from the sea goes by the evocative  haar. The place Liptrot uneasily calls home is an enchanted, windswept, salt-scoured archipelago where the northern lights are known as Merry Dancers and “lambing” is both a season and a verb. The term most central to Liptrot and this gorgeous debut, its guiding symbol and title, is “the outrun,” a stretch of uncultivated hillside land at “the furthest reaches of a farm, only semi-tamed, where domestic and wild animals coexist and humans don’t often visit so spirit people are free to roam.” It is in these wild pastures where Liptrot and her brother grew up with their bipolar father and very religious mother on their family sheep farm. Eager to leave at age 18, Liptrot spent the next decade in London, the antithesis of her bucolic home in the north, transforming herself into a party girl of the Hackney district, a place where “it felt like the perpetual last day of a festival.” It is exactly the excitement she sought when leaving Orkney, but inevitably the party ceases to be fun. As friends and confederates grow up and drink less, Liptrot sinks deeper into alcoholic isolation. She loses all the typical things: friends, boyfriends, apartments, jobs. Soon all decisions (or lack thereof) flow from one primary purpose: getting drunk. One night she is attacked after hitching a ride with a violent stranger, and narrowly escapes, a brush with trauma that a lesser writer would exploit for dramatic effect. Instead, Liptrot makes a realistic, anticlimactic but ultimately braver and more honest narrative decision to reveal her Turning Point as an emotional threshold — she just couldn’t take the pain of drinking any longer and enrolls herself in rehab.