Saoirse Ronan stars in a newly adapted sobriety memoir

Our October Book Selection is "The Outrun" by Amy Liptrot, set on the evocative Orkney Islands

October’s Memoiring Book Club selection is The Outrun, an addiction and recovery memoir set on the evocative Orkney Islands, by award-winning author Amy Liptrot. Grab a copy now! And read on for details about our guest author Zoom conversation…

The Outrun became a Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller, and won or was shortlisted for major prizes (the Wainright, Ondaatje, and Wellcome Prize) when it launched in launched in the UK on New Year’s Eve 2015. With the US launch in 2017, the reviews, like Domenica Ruta’s in New York Times’s were strong. Ruta, herself a New York Times bestselling author of an addiction memoir, called it “stunning… full of lucid self-discovery and shimmering prose.”

Even so, I’d missed hearing about it. Had I not recently been on a “windswept vibes” kick in my reading life (hello, Whale Fall), I might never have come into contact with this book about a woman who returns home to the cold air of Orkney, hoping to stay sober after a decade of drinking away her 20s in London.

Now is when I expect the book will really find its US readers, because a compelling movie adaptation, starring a very ruddy-cheeked and wind-swept Saoirse Ronan, is landing in theaters as I type. (Films are an entry point for book purchases. Do we agree?)

Directed and co-written by Nora Fingscheidt, a German filmmaker who created The Unforgiven with Sandra Bullock, the critics are praising Ronan’s performance and the film’s atmospheric setting.*

Ronan on location in the Orkneys (Photo: Beinthescene/Instagram)

On the movie poster (and new tie-in book jacket) for The Outrun, Ronan’s hair is oceanic blue, like Liptrot’s own from time to time. Ronan’s eyes are closed and chin lifted, as if communing with nature. As if, I imagine, she’s asking the bracing wind and salt air to act like a salve upon a mind consumed with the effort of not-drinking. In the background, the North Sea, a gull-strewn sky, and the treacherous terrain of a hard-to-inhabit archipelago spark with transformation metaphors of a complex order. I predict viewers aplenty for this adaptation. (See the video clip at the end of this post with Liptrot, Ronan, and the filmmakers about the adaptation.)

The natural world, as they sometimes say, is a character in the memoir, and metaphors abound. Here’s an excerpt, which ran in The Guardian:

When I first came back to Orkney I felt like the strandings of jellyfish, laid out on the rocks for all to see. I was washed up: no longer buoyant, battered and storm-tossed. I think of the things I have lost: my compass, stolen laptop, two shoes – one in the canal, one out of the door of a moving car – my boyfriend. But I also think of the things I have found from the sea: the fishing boat, the seal, the “ambergris”. These things were worn out and washed up but they were not always useless. They had tales to tell. —Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

October Guest Author Event

I’m excited to read—and watch—The Outrun with you for Memoiring this month, then log onto Zoom to discuss them together.

Subscribers to this newsletter are invited to join us over Zoom on Monday, October 28 at 6:30pm ET in conversation with author Domenica Ruta. Ruta wrote the Times book review for The Outrun. She will also be talking about the craft of writing about addiction and using nature and setting to signal complex emotions in your work. Registration is now open. RSVP to save your spot! This event is free for Memoiring subscribers.

New here? Here’s what we’re about and why I’ve become a memoir hype woman.

*I feel like not enough memoirs get adapted. Does Hollywood not read memoir? Or, is it more like what writer Victoria Lo Bue over at the Double Text said to me in our DM’s, Hollywood doesn’t yet know what to do with them?

Question: What memoirs do you think would make awesome adaptations? I await your reply!