Recovery as Bad Fantasy

“The Outrun” is a ghost story that can't escape the horrors of capitalism

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I am attracted to these places at the edge. I crave either life in the inner city or to go to islands beyond islands, islands of the dead.

I’d drink until my eyes went dead.

This autumn critics have run wild with clichés – heart-wrenching, moving, brutally honest – describing Saoirse Ronan’s turn as a young alcoholic in the film The Outrun. But Amy Liptrot’s original memoir is more seasonal.

The Outrun is quit lit meets nature writing meets ghost story.

The book’s title is borrowed from a strip of land on the Orkney islands where Liptrot grew up. The Outrun is a liminal place, “a stretch of coastland at the top of the farm where the grass is always short, pummelled by wind and sea spray year-round”. More than a geographical edge between land and water, the Outrun lies between the living and the dead. In one of Liptrot’s childhood memories, a cherished puppy runs across the field after some bunnies, never to return. The edge-world of the Outrun sets the scene for a ghostly tale of addiction and recovery.

Sobriety stories seduce in our “era of opioid addiction, wellness obsession and internet”. Typically classified as nonfiction, perhaps their truer genre is fantasy. Or better yet, horror. They are tales of the otherworldly – not just because they often incorporate the 12 Steps and attach themselves to visions of higher powers, but because addiction itself is typically portrayed as an edge experience: something that takes the narrator to a near-death state, before they embark on the rough road to redemption.

Orkney is the ideal location for such a drama: a series of islands off the north coast of the Scottish mainland, starkly stunning but also fierce and full of lore, a sparsely populated land where sea monsters and selkies (seals who transform into humans) roam as freely as the rare birds Liptrot is eventually hired to trace. Nature and its mysteries are common features in narratives of recovery and redemption. And as eco-writing The Outrun has its moments of awe. The book needs these sparkling descriptions of the land and ocean to fill its pages because the plot itself is paper thin: young woman born into a chaotic family with a mentally ill father and a religiously fanatic mother goes south to study and work and is lured into the party life of London. She drinks way too much, and when the party’s over heads back north to get sober. The end.

While there are signs of the struggles of abstinence, much of the writing lingers on the fantastical world of Orkney: “the echoing moans and ghoulish howls [of] grey seals basking on the rocks”; the legend of Assipattle and the sea monster, Mester Muckle Stoorworm; “the landscape of shipwrecks and howling storms”. There’s the Fata Magana or “superior mirage”, a visual illusion “in which light is bent as it passes through layers of air at different temperatures”, on special days making faraway islands appear upside-down. Liptrot comes to see sober life – “this stunning reality” – as a kind of hallucination. By her own account, she is living a “Neolithic fanstasy”.

The modern world interrupts from time to time. This is the twenty-first century, after all. This is a woman who runs around the Outrun with drum-and-bass blasting through her headphones. But as a writer Liptrot is drawn less to the challenges of modernity than the temptations of legend, the unseen depths of the ocean. Of course, Orkney is not all fierce wind, deathly cliffs and phantastic tremors. Not all farmers and fishers. There is the dirt and grime, the work, of life under capitalism. There is oil. In her early twenties, the year her parents split up, Liptrot returns briefly to Orkney and gets a job as a cleaner at an oil terminal. “I felt like I had become a ghost,” she writes, “I was the wall that had eyes, knowing if workers had slept in their beds last night. I was the shadowy figure, scuttling away when I heard footsteps.” Her supervisor soon tells her she’s not cut out for this job, and she heads to London.

The metropolis provides a foil for the somewhat predictable gothic delights of Orkney. It’s in the city, and specifically the eastern Borough of Hackney, that the full force of horror is let loose. Hackney – already mythologised as everything from Murder Mile to gentrification ground zero – is here a land of phantom-like people who shiver through the landscape, nameless and formless. Glimpsed through a series of flashbacks, the humans of Hackney are shapeshifters and zombies (racially loaded tropes that the book ignores, as it largely ignores other forms of stratification in modern British society). Recalled from the wonders of Orkney, Londoners are strange and self-absorbed creatures. While watching rare birds by the sea on the small island of Papay, Liptrot reflects, “As in the park in Hackney, where drinkers and families became segregated into distinct noisy areas, each species has their own level on the cliffs.”

This particular reader, a long-time resident of Hackney, is both drawn to and repelled by such scenes. I too have danced under the railway arches from dusk to dawn and back among “ornate Goths and pierced metallers […] exotic and tattooed creatures”. I find the comparisons between the suspension between of time and space in a cave-like club and swimming through the ice-cold water as if one were moving “through the looking glass” thrilling. But while Liptrot has a gift for conjuring wild fantastical scenes of magic and transformation, whether in Orkney or London, she lacks the language to describe what happens when the party is over – what happens, that is, to anyone but herself. Her forays into realism are flat and sometimes cruel.

Liptrot recognises that her experience of drinking and drugs is not the same as those of everyone else who might fall under the broad moniker “addict”. Nevertheless, she takes the shared experience of recovery (through a publicly funded rehab programme) as a cue to describe her fellow travellers in her own narrow terms. Unlike the rich vocabulary of the chapters on Orkney, these short sections read like the new girl on the block trying on whatever bits of slang she’s picked up to try to give herself some street cred: “Had all my life been leading up to doing Kundalini yoga with a bunch of pissheads and junkies in various states of physical disrepair and mental anguish on an institutional carpet?”

These are the people whose company helps keep her sober in the first months after she gives up drink. People Liptrot casually describes as “jailbirds, junkies and crackheads”. Those who don’t make it evoke not sympathy but disgust. Of one man who relapses she writes, “The deterioration in his appearance was shocking. He had lost weight and teeth, and his hands and face were covered with sores…” None of this language is novel. Contemporary culture – from the narcoculture peddled by the likes of Netflix to gonzo journalism to the mainstream media’s moral panics around public drug use – abounds in descriptions of people who use drugs as abject beings, “trapped, helpless and hopeless in a befouled subterranean world”, a portrayal that Jayson Althofer and Brian Musgrove argue “draws from the Gothic image-bank that historically structures drug writing”.

Such ethically dubious descriptions of other people who use drugs highlights a tension in the contemporary sobriety memoir. In his review of The Outrun Will Self, who otherwise praises the book to high sobriety heaven, “puzzle[s] over Liptrot’s willingness to reveal not only the details of her degradation, but those of her recovery as well.” Liptrot writes openly about attending AA meetings, about struggling with the idea of a higher power and working the 12 Steps. But AA is, after all, an anonymous fellowship. One of those steps – number 11 – explicitly states that members “need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and film.” As Self says, “This is the story of one person. But like other sobriety tales, this one gives the author license to talk about other people’s drug use.”

In the English language, drug writing that draws heavily on the tropes of horror (what critics have called alternatively “Gothic pharmacologies” or “gothic pharmographies”) – dates back at least to the Romantic poets, running through the Victorian era (quintessentially the genre-defining writing of Thomas De Quincey) and William Burroughs’s iconic mid-twentieth-century Junky to abundant tales of early twenty-first century urban drug use. What distinguishes this tradition from The Outrun is less the drug itself (opium vs alcohol) than a preoccupation with excessive drug use in the context of industrialism and capitalism. As Althofer and Musgrove put it, in this tradition “the ‘horror’ of addiction is imbricated with the horrified recoil from mass modernity.”

Whereas Liptrot is eager to distinguish herself as “an alcoholic”, a particular type of human being distinct from the (implicitly “normal” non-alcoholic) mass, books like Junky meditate on the conditions of the drug user as symptomatic of the wider experience of alienation under capitalism, representing “addiction” itself not as a personal pathology but, in Althofer and Musgrove’s words, “as an organising principle of capitalist modernity”. In contrast, because Liptrot interprets her reasons for drinking as preconditioned by biology and family trauma, she brushes over reflections on how the outside world – from oppressive working conditions to threats or realities of war and violence – might influence problem drug use. Let me be clear. I’m not suggesting that we romanticise drugs as an easy escape from the gruels of industrialism or alienated labour. Or that we deny that personal history might contribute to alcoholism. But the individual recovery story extracted from the wider world offers the wrong kind of fantasy: the notion that we can solve social problem solely through individual change.

The Outrun ends with a gushing account of the miracle of a newly sober life: “The last two years stretch and glitter behind me like the wake of the ferry. The powers are churning inside me.” These are tempting metaphors. But this reader yearned for something more than a lingering image of recovery as individual conquest, achieved in isolation, in a fantasised escape from modernity. Without any sense of how problem drug use overlaps with the horrors of capitalism, without any vision of the joys of collective struggle beyond the salvation of the alcoholic self, this ode to the good sober life reads like an empty promise.

Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here. If you like what you read, you can get a paid subscription or leave me a tip.

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