"I was thinking recently about Amy Winehouse," says Liptrot. "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 thought I could handle it," she tells me. On another night, she sustains a violent assault. One night, she quits a party to go and drink faster than the rounds are coming. She loses job after job, and hides her bottles from a beloved boyfriend, who leaves. But alcoholism quickly kills the romance. "I wanted to rub the city onto my skin I wanted to inhale the streets," she writes after one euphoric night. She left to study literature in Edinburgh, then settled in London to pursue teenage dreams of working as a music journalist. In her teens, Liptrot bristled against the island's limits-the confining cliffs and vanishing horizon known in local mythology as Hether Blether. 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." 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. Liptrot had read many addiction memoirs, but found they mostly ended with the author entering rehab.
(The title refers to a long stretch of cliffs on her windy home isle.) 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.
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