Thin Places – Kerri ní Dochartaigh (2021)

Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh was one of those impulse buys, based solely on something I saw on Social media. My second nonfiction review in a row – that’s quite unusual for me. A mixture of memoir, history, and nature writing, it is her first book. I thought it was an incredible debut.

“Battles, governments, laws, leaders – borders – come and go, but the land and its sacred places remain unmoved and unchanged in their core. There are some places in this broken and bleeding world in which I have experienced moments – fleeting but clear as winter light – where I feel hope like the beat of moth-wings on my skin. There are still places on this earth that sing of all that came and left, of all that is still here and of all that is yet to come. Places that have been touched, warmed, by the presence of something. By its heat, by its breath, by the beat of its heart. Places that hold on their surface a shadow-trace left behind by something we can still sense but no longer see.”

Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry at the height of the Troubles. She grew up on a council estate, in a family where one parent was protestant and one Catholic. This was both unusual and risky. The family was to break down and her father left when Kerri was still in primary school. Terrifyingly, in the space of one year her family were forced out of two homes and when she was just eleven a petrol bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Fear was a huge part of the place she grew up in, and it was a huge part of her life – her experiences traumatised her – affecting how she thought about the place that she had grown up in.

It is clear that Kerri was writing this book toward the end of 2019, before the issue with the border that arose out of the Brexit negotiations was settled. It was also a period that saw some violence erupt again – and the appalling murder of a young journalist Lyra Mckee shocked us all for the return to violence it might herald. For Kerri the prospect of a return to the bad old days was unthinkable. The memory of that petrol bomb attack haunting her still – unsurprisingly.

I am older than Kerri by more than a decade, yet I feel I grew up with the Troubles too – only for me they were just pictures on the evening news, and occasional bag searches in some buildings in the city centre. The reality that Kerri shares here – of growing up, under constant threat – where your own neighbours might hound you out of your home, or throw a petrol bomb through your window is a stark reminder of those desperate times. I don’t want to get too political here – but how politicians could play around with that fragile peace is beyond me.

One thing her childhood and her upbringing had given her – thanks in particular to her grandfather, was an appreciation of nature, and a knowledge of and affinity to what she calls the thin places.

“Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter. They are places, that make us feel something larger than ourselves, as though we are held in a place between worlds, beyond experience.”

In this wonderful, honest book, Kerri explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal. Having left Ireland for Edinburgh and Bristol – to escape the trauma of her past – she is pulled back to it again, finding herself living within a few streets of where she grew up. During this period Kerri struggles with her mental health and her relationships aren’t always happy. At the time when she is writing the book, it’s clear that Kerri is in a better place, living in the countryside with her partner M. Yet, in writing this book she must naturally return to some dark times – to some dark places her own mind took her. There must be both catharsis and pain in this kind of honesty.

“I spent most of my life feeling – harrowing as it is to admit, now – that I somehow must have deserved these things: they were mine, and to shed them would be to shed me, in turn. As though the thing that best defined me was the suffering and the sorrow, the things I had seen, and the things I had lost. I could not, for decades, even try to imagine that there might be something in underneath it all, that might be a self that would remain no matter how many layers I might slowly learn to undo.”

There is a lot in this book about place, about belonging and how borders are manmade – reminding us that people are so often bound up in the landscape of where they are from. Kerri is asking us to reclaim those landscapes through our language, and through study – understanding the world around us is so important I think. The land that she loves – that we all love wherever we are from – is so much more than the lines on a map.

This is a beautifully written, tender, lyrical book – and I am so glad I found out about it and read it.