She wants to rub the city on her skin, to inhale the streets. You want to be her, when after a party she walks in London streets at night with worn-down boots and a bottle of beer. You turn pages as nervously as she smokes cigarettes but then you stop and wallow on them as a seal on a warm sandy beach. But then suddenly hair fall loose, and you shake your head laughing. There are moments when this braid gets so heavy, your scalp hurts. Sharpening her vision to notice nature, mingles with an honest inner dialogue, thus creating a kind of braid on pages. Others are allowed to swallow she is not. The world, which she unpacks again, by swimming in the sea throughout a year, even if skin burns from cold, by watching the stars and birds with binoculars and studying the history of Orkney islands, this world slowly heals the wounds, that are constantly heated open with cravings for one tiny sip of a drink. Absolutely open, disarmingly honest, life affirming and with a thin lining of silver sorrow. “The Outrun”, by a British writer and journalist Amy Liptrot, is her first book and it’s about her. North Sea, edges of cliffs, and wind, that blows, weaves her anew. The harsh winter months she decides to spend on an even smaller island with only seventy inhabitants – in a pink house. Including the place where she grew up and wanted to leave so badly years ago. To learn to see the world with new, sober eyes. She finds herself at a rehab and returns to the island afterwards, in hope to understand the traps of consciousness and the deeps of subconscious. Friends, including her boyfriend, have left her, she is fired more than once, almost raped. The young and cool woman, diva of the London’s dance floors, tries to crawl out of the vicious circle of the alcohol addiction. In her early twenties she happily left her parents house in Orkney, on one of many islands in Scotland, where she felt isolated, and hurried to metropolis – to experience the real life and real parties. Who hasn’t done some crazy things when young? She was a teenager, with dried magic mushrooms in her tummy. She put her mouth to the red-stone pillars of the cathedral to try to bite and kiss it.

The outrun liptrot