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Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home
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About This Book
Both a celebration of the natural world and a memoir of one family's experience during the Troubles, Thin Places is a gorgeous braid of "two strands, one wondrous and elemental, the other violent and unsettling, sustained by vividly descriptive prose" (The Guardian). Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town—although for her family, and many others, there was no right side. One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year, they were forced out of two homes. When she was eleven, a homemade bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like ní Dochartaigh's, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it seemed there was no escape. In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, how violence and poverty are never more than a stone's throw from beauty and hope, and how we are, once again, allowing our borders to become hard and terror to creep back in. Ní Dochartaigh asks us to reclaim our landscape through language and study, and remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map. It will always be ours, but—at the same time—it never really was.
Reviews
"It asks you to look at the sea and the sky and the trees anew; to wonder, when you are somewhere beautiful, whether you might be in a thin place, and what your responsibilities are to your location.It asks you to show compassion for people you think are difficult, to cultivate empathy, to try to understand the trauma that made them the way they are."
"This is a sad book ..."
"It takes ní Dochartaigh many years to find her way back to the most important place of all: herself."
"And although her animist worldview bestows a sacred significance on every living thing, whether a dancing moth, a wind-bent reed or a passing urban fox scavenging for food, Thin Places is at heart a survivor's story located in the real and brutally Darwinian world of lived experience, a world more red in tooth and claw than nature itself."
"A moment in which she briefly transcended grief on a black shore in Iceland, following the death of her grandfather, is rendered particularly luminous."
"Passionate, moving and beautifully written, this is a remarkable account of trauma and ways to acknowledge and overcome it."
"A beautifully written tribute to the healing power of nature."
"The book skirted on a thin place of understanding ní Dochartaigh's past and trying to grasp Ireland's traumatic history, shifting from personal anecdotes to extended sentences on the powers of nature."
"In writing that's ethereal and elliptical, she laments Ireland's collective 'loss of connection with the natural world' and cleverly uses this 'unwilding' as a warning about the threat of extinction faced by indigenous flora and fauna, and also as a lens through which to look at the toll of oppression and violence on humanity ..."
"This may be true, but good luck fact-checking it."
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