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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
"This may be true, but good luck fact-checking it."
"It is an often precarious balancing act, the two strands, one wondrous and elemental, the other violent and unsettling, sustained by the vividly descriptive prose ..."
"Passionate, moving and beautifully written, this is a remarkable account of trauma and ways to acknowledge and overcome it."
"They have become her thin places ..."
"But, as the best books are, Thin Places is transporting."
"For the author of this memoir, it's through acknowledging the mysteries and beauty of the natural world and spending time in its liminal spaces, something she learned about through her grandfather, a natural storyteller ..."
"Ní Dochartaigh set out to weave together a personal narrative in combination with historical facts and descriptions of the natural world, but at times the chapters failed to mold together in a sequential order."
"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 ..."
"Woven throughout is the connection between the destruction of the natural world and the turmoil that has plagued the Irish border and her own growth ..."
"A starker rhetoric might be better suited to the in-between places Ní Dochartaigh evokes."
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