Thin Places
KERRI NÍ DOCHARTAIGH
(CANONGATE, 272 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49) • tel 020 7799 4064
Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in 1983, in Derry, Northen Ireland, slap in the middle of the Troubles, to a Protestant father and a Catholic mother. A traumatic childhood was inevitable: petrol-bombed out of a Protestant housing estate, bullied out of a Catholic one, temporarily at peace in a remote village shattered by the murder of a friend, and then in flight outside Northern Ireland till her decision to return to Derry in 2016, just as the post Brexit atmosphere began to darken the North once again. No wonder she was driven through some very bleak times, mental and physical. What saved her were and are the “thin places” of the title.
This is how ní Dochartaigh herself describes them: “There are places that are so thin that we see right through it all, through the untruths we have told ourselves about who we are. We see through every last bit that we once thought defined us. We see that, like a landscape that has undergone vast and irreversible shifts, we too might be capable of change.”
