The Outrun: A Memoir

Amy Liptrot grew up on a cliffside farm on Orkney, a group of islands at the north of Scotland. Her memoir moves between her childhood on this remote farm, her years of alcohol addiction in London, and her gradual recovery after returning to the islands. The narrative is non-linear, weaving between these periods as Liptrot traces the forces, both natural and psychological, that shaped her.

Liptrot's story begins at her birth. On a May evening, her mother held her newborn daughter on the island airport runway while her father, a 28-year-old restrained in a straitjacket and sedated after a manic episode triggered by the early birth, was wheeled from the opposite direction. Because Orkney had no secure psychiatric unit, he had to be flown to Aberdeen. Her mother briefly placed the baby in his lap before he was taken away. This scene establishes the memoir's two central tensions: the landscape of Orkney and the inheritance of mental illness.

When Liptrot returned to the farm after more than a decade away, she walked the Outrun, the farm's largest and most remote field, a stretch of exposed coastland where ewes and Highland cattle graze. Her English parents had bought the farm after traveling north until they found one they could afford. Her father now lived in a caravan on the property. He told her about mysterious tremors and booms felt along the west coast, and these conversations unsettled Liptrot because his talk of uncanny sensations recalled the warning signs of a manic episode. He had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 15, and his cycles of mania and depression shaped their family. She remembers an episode when she was about 11: He smashed every window in the farmhouse, and she crouched with him in her bedroom as sedatives took effect.

Liptrot left Orkney at 18, eager to escape. Before London, she returned briefly as a graduate, cleaning at an oil terminal on the island of Flotta while her parents' marriage disintegrated. Her mother, a capable farmer pushed to her limits while her husband was repeatedly hospitalized, had turned to an evangelical church and once had to sell the entire sheep flock because she could not manage alone. Alone in the farmhouse, Liptrot drank at the kitchen table, sometimes driving to buy more wine. Eventually her supervisor found her crying and told her to leave. She departed for London with a one-way ticket.

In London, Liptrot threw herself into the city's nightlife. She met a boyish American at a gig, and they began an intense relationship, moving in together after six months. But she was already writing him letters about her fear that alcohol would come between them. Her drinking had escalated from teenage parties in Orkney through university and into solitary addiction. She cycled through the city at night, crashed into a canal, and came home bleeding. He left, she lost her job, and she could not afford the flat. She moved from sofa to flatshare, always hiding bottles.

Her situation continued to worsen. She brought strangers home, spent hung-over days in bed, and appeared in court twice in one month. One night, after drinking and taking MDMA, a synthetic stimulant, she accepted a ride from a stranger who attacked her, punching her and dragging her toward a park. She fought back, screaming, "I am stronger than you," and three men intervened. The attacker was later sentenced to six years for two counts of attempted rape. Her drinking also caused seizures, a sign of serious neurological damage. Suicidal feelings increased. Yet she had a fleeting vision of a sober life that could be full of hope, and she held onto it.

Liptrot entered a 12-week, publicly funded day programme for addiction. The group was diverse, including older Cockneys, Muslim men, and people with cocaine and heroin addictions. They recited the Serenity Prayer, completed homework based on the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), and shared their darkest experiences. Of the 10 people who started when she did, only two graduated. She learned AA's core principle: Do not take the first drink, one day at a time. The obsession, Liptrot reflects, remains like the tremors at the farm, an almost imperceptible rumbling always present.

After the programme, Liptrot drifted through early sobriety in London, unemployed and living in a bedsit above a pub. Cravings came unexpectedly but passed. Her father needed help on the farm, and her mother encouraged a visit. Back in Orkney, nine months sober, she began repairing drystone dykes, traditional walls built without mortar, that storms had destroyed. The slow, physical work became a metaphor for her recovery. She stayed on for lambing season, then applied for a summer job with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) on a corncrake conservation project.

She got the job and spent the summer conducting nighttime surveys, driving across the islands listening for the call of the corncrake, a rare bird declining because mechanized mowing kills chicks hidden in long grass. She counted 32 calling males and visited farmers as "the corncrake wife." On the final night, she saw a corncrake for the first and only time, running across the road. Liptrot reflects that her fate had become intertwined with the bird's: Both were clinging to existence.

Rather than returning to London, Liptrot moved to Papa Westray, known as Papay, one of the smallest inhabited Orkney islands. She rented Rose Cottage for the winter and acknowledged the risk: This would be the perfect location for solitary drinking. She settled into routines shaped by tides, wind, and the moon's phases. She joined community events, including first footing, the New Year's custom of visiting neighbors after midnight. She watched meteor showers and the Northern Lights from her doorstep and joined the Orkney Polar Bears, a group that swims in the sea every Saturday year-round. Cold-water exhilaration began to replace the outlet of drinking. She noticed a shift: When stressed, her first impulse was sometimes to get in the sea rather than to get to the pub.

She began working the AA 12 Steps with Dee, another sober woman on Papay who became her sponsor. Walking the cliffs and watching waves, Liptrot had a breakthrough: The symptoms of mania resemble drunkenness, and her drinking may have been an attempt to attain the manic states she witnessed in her father. At Step Two, which asks for belief in a power greater than oneself, she accepted the forces she had always known: wind, sea, erosion. At the Loch of Tredwell, an early Christian pilgrimage site, she confronted her aversion to religion, rooted in her mother's evangelical church. She wrote her own Step Three prayer and reached a more compassionate view of her mother's faith, seeing religion as another way of seeking the transcendental.

She traveled to Fair Isle in January and reflected on what sobriety had made possible. Back on Papay, she found a Finnish vodka bottle on the beach with about a shot left inside. She opened it, smelled it, and felt the old pull. Then she screwed the cap back on, threw it down, and laughed wildly into the waves.

As spring approached, the Outrun had been chosen as a potential site for a renewable energy substation to harness Orkney's powerful tides and waves. Liptrot draws a final parallel: Like the wave-power devices smashed by the seas they were designed to harness, she has been trying to channel powerful forces without being destroyed by them. She boarded the ferry at the spring equinox, two years sober, heading to see her toddler nephew Joe, born shortly after she got sober, who will never see her drunk. Watching Papay disappear over the horizon, she felt powerful and renewed.