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Hermit: A memoir of finding freedom in a wild place

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By the end, I still felt she hadn’t quite found what she was after – although from where she started, she was in a much better place. Left on her own at a Barn on the Exmoor hills, I could feel her badly dented confidence in herself start to grow and bloom over time as she learnt to be more self-sufficient, in different ways, alone in nature. Although I felt I had a story to tell, I doubted I would ever tell it, and I probably never would have, were it not for my wonderful agent, Max Edwards. Jade writing is so evocative, and she did a wonderful job at allowing even more of her personality to shine through her reading. That’s why I’ve come to appreciate creative nonfiction, as it’s such a magical way to honour the experience of living.

There were some nice moments with wild horses at night and a rare bird sighting event on the island. Slowly, the synopsis continues, with the help of Devon’s salted cliffs and damp forested footpaths, Jade comes back to herself and to life discovering the power of being alone.Along the way, she demonstrates her love of nature, and her growing understanding that isolation can be powerful and not necessarily something to be feared or avoided.

They met me when I was really together and doing my Masters, which kind of felt like a fraudulent version of myself. I am a sucker for a memoir about nature and isolation, and this is up there with the best I have read. While clearly not a hermit in the traditional sense, as we learn from information interspersed throughout the story about hermits past and more present (including Norwich’s own Mother Julian, who I am intrigued by), I think the author (with her phone, the internet and a husband etc) could perhaps be considered a modern version. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). For her own life, struggling to find somewhere to live, she comes to understand certain features of simplicity and isolation.

It was also very moving to hear positive things from people who live a secluded life that is not necessarily of their own volition, and from those who’ve either felt ambivalent or ‘bad’ about their desire for reclusion. Although connection is associated with increased mental wellbeing, studies show that the more online we are, the more unbalanced we become in real life, she says. Your emotions, your soul, are entangled in it, but you’ve still got to get up everyday and meet it— there is no other way. A duty to not put them through any more discomfort or pain than I felt was necessary to tell the story.

Still, even knowing that, I was not prepared for how comforting and simultaneously uncomfortable it was to read. Someone suggested that maybe I didn’t have much sympathy for myself within that relationship, but personally I afford myself the sympathy I think I deserve and I’m still very frustrated with how blind I was, how I behaved and how I allowed myself to be manipulated for so long, and so I was writing it from a slightly critical point of view. The chapters towards the end when Jade is in Lundy during the pandemic really draw the reader into the experience of living so simply and so cut off from the rest of the world.

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