Readers want painful life stories. But at what cost to the author?

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There’s a moment in The Outrun, Amy Liptrot’s nature memoir, when you know you’re reading something special. In fact, many moments: every time its author fuses with the landscape. As she recovers from alcoholism, Liptrot sees herself as a continent, a headland, one fathom deep. The last two years “glitter like the wake of a ferry”. I take it to mean she has found herself among the jetsam, her new sobriety a catalyst for finally being able to zoom out.
The Outrun film adaptation opened the Edinburgh International Film Festival last week. It is a bona fide A-list banger, with Saoirse Ronan as the lead and Orkney as a character in its own right, all notched coastline and swelling sea. So it should be: thanks in no small part to its setting, The Outrun has sold 110,000 copies in Britain and counting (and booksellers certainly will be counting after the movie brings it to a wider audience).
There is mastery in the way Liptrot summons the Orkney of her recovery, some great power buried in pale sunrises and the search for corncrakes. What is the reason for The Outrun’s success? Trauma, certainly. But the right kind of trauma. It could so easily have been another painful life story: cramped scenes of addiction in after-dark London. What makes it special is the way the tale has been smoothed and given space to breathe. The environment is essential — the island acts as a great exhalation, allowing readers to come up for air after the tension of the city.
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Perhaps most effective is the way it gives trauma a shape. Creative expression cannot just be the linear telling of time. It must not only be memory spilt onto the page. It needs to be rendered, picked back up and then reworked until it is finely spun. You have to move bits about, give it a proper setting, a plot and fully formed characters. Or, if needs be, shift the focus entirely, on to an island, for instance, and then blend yourself back in.
The best books and movies about trauma know this. In Wim Wenders’s 2023 film Perfect Days, a sixtysomething toilet cleaner goes about his duties in Tokyo. On Hirayama’s commute he listens to cassettes: Patti Smith, Lou Reed, the Animals, Nina Simone. At lunch he takes photographs on film of the sun coming through tree canopies, the light wheeling and dappling bright gilt-green. Every night he unfolds his thin mattress and reads second-hand novels under the glow of his lamp.
Turmoil lurks at the edges of this analogue life. Hirayama’s niece visits and then his sister, bringing to the surface unfulfilled care responsibilities to an elderly father. But so too does lightness, in a clandestine game of noughts and crosses played with an unknown stranger, and in the standards he sets for himself scrubbing Tokyo’s beautifully designed public services.
The end product is komorebi, the film’s original Japanese title, literally meaning the sun leaking through the trees, and figuratively translating to the interplay between shade and light. Retelling of trauma requires artful chiaroscuro. To achieve volume a portrait cannot only be dark.
The introduction of hope and distance serve another purpose. Readers are hungry for trauma. Viewers want painful life stories. But at what cost to the author? As the writer Claudia Rankine puts it: “Memory is a tough place. You were there.” Shaping your story offsets the worst effects of reliving it. Testimony is in motion until you trap it in amber. Adding structure creates an endpoint, set to music and wrapped in a bow.
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Trauma finally has a resting place — until fans want to pick over its bones. The American writer Hanya Yanagihara would know. Her polarising novel A Little Life is undergoing a resurgence thanks to BookTok, a subgenre of TikTok democratising literature. I loved the misery porn page-turner when it came out in 2015 but on a reread I struggled with its bleakness. Is it age that makes me crave comfort? A little more komorebi among the gloom?
It’s not quite levity I’m looking for but context. A continent, a headland, one fathom deep. Space clouds, drystone dyking, atmospheric turbulence disturbing travelling light. A pair of Clydesdales grazing on cliff fields. The knowledge that to repair stone walls you first have to break them down further. This is how you process trauma, and how Liptrot did in her island renewal. @palebackwriter
Eight years on, The Outrun (Canongate, £10.99. Order a copy at timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members) is still as fresh as a prevailing westerly. A new edition with Saoirse Ronan on the cover is out on September 12. The film is on general release in cinemas across the UK and Ireland on September 27.