The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Is this the life I’d stopped drinking to live?’
In her latest memoir, Amy Liptrot dives into the quicksand of internet dating, finding heartbreak (and raccoons) in Berlin
192pp, Canongate, T £12.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £14.99, ebook £11.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
In the end it all came good for Amy Liptrot. The Outrun, her bestselling debut memoir published in 2016, chronicled the alcoholism she succumbed to in her 20s, and the remedial retreat she beat from the fleshpots to an islet on the edge of her native Orkney. Hers was a beautiful redemption, bravely told. Those who follow her on social media will know she has since found love, is the mother of two young children, and Saoirse Ronan is to play her on screen. She’s even presented Radio 4’s Tweet of the Day (she opted for noisy birds – arctic terns, hooded crows, corncrakes).
However, writers must keep writing, so for her second book Liptrot spools back to where she left off. By the end of The Outrun her new sobriety felt entrenched and non-negotiable but, as she reveals in The Instant, it had not solved her chronic loneliness. Her phone is full of snaps of the sky, and none of people. “On nights when I was aching and alone,” she confides, “I wondered if this was the life I’d stopped drinking to live.”
The story resumes in the autumn of 2014. We know this because an early chapter finds Liptrot down south in Poplar, voting “yes” in the Scottish independence referendum (the Poplar vote, if you will). The hunt for love takes her on to Berlin, strategically selected as a cosmopolis good not only for casual sex but also “creative ambitions”. She doesn’t say, but she must have been working on The Outrun at the time.
Liptrot barely meets a soul to begin with. A digital native, she mostly resides on the internet, unanchored and bodiless. “I am not sure I exist at all,” she worries, “and I’m looking for something or someone to weigh me down.” She ghosts unseen through nightclubs, hopscotches between flats, flunks language class to pack tea alongside other drifters and regrets that “Germany barely touches me”.
Hungering for nature, she trains her binoculars on goshawks in parks and even searches for raccoons. Berlin has a large but invisible population, descended from fur farm animals released in 1945, with whom she claims an affinity as another “invasive species”. The guileless solipsism is a Liptrot trope – she has an instinct, a Pavlovian mania even, for melding her identity into things around her. “Unbidden,” she says, “certain objects glow with relevance”. So wide are her eyes she mistakes a cigarette butt flung from a balcony for a shooting star.
The meat, when the main course is eventually served, is a relationship with a man she meets via an app. In she plunges, heedless of the Friar’s wise caveat to Romeo about violent delights and violent ends. More than the dopamine hits of online connection, this is the instant of the title. In a heartbeat Liptrot votes “yes” for what turns out to be a summer of love, abruptly truncated. She is brilliant on the addictive bliss of romance, all alfresco couplings and batty romcom japes, then relentlessly – if a little repetitively – self-searching on the cold-turkey tortures that follow.
As a journal of moonlit despair The Instant is slighter than The Outrun, which is probably a relief. It resolves into a parable about the quicksands of internet dating, and a survivors’ handbook “for the heartsick” who are its dedicatees. It could also be read as both an elegy for the Euro-roaming sacrificed to Brexit, and a warning against the unrooted life.
In the aftermath a brokenhearted Liptrot takes up stonemasonry. “My ultimate aim is to carve my own gravestone,” she declares. Her wispy, flitting prose poetry is composed with a feather not a chisel. An unkind parodist might find things to mock (“I’ve been carrying a whale’s tooth from the island in my pocket”; “I remember the different belt buckles of all my ex-boyfriends”). But you do root for a writer so earnestly fuelled by hope.
She mistakes a cigarette butt flung from a balcony for a shooting star