Review: 'Thin Places,' by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

When Kerri ní Dochartaigh was 11, she recalls, someone lobbed a firebomb at her house, chasing her family into the street. On this and other occasions, her youth was upended by Northern Ireland's horrifying sectarian violence.

But because many of her neighbors had stories that were at least as disturbing, she suppressed her feelings, fearing that her "trauma wasn't hard enough earned."

After years of quietly coping with "unquantifiable loss," ní Dochartaigh opted for a new path — she'd write it all down, relinquishing as much of her pain as possible.

The result is "Thin Places," an evocative memoir about surviving the Troubles, the deadly three-decade struggle between Britain — personified by the country's mostly Protestant troops — and Northern Ireland's Catholic majority.

Ní Dochartaigh, who is in her late 30s, was born to a Catholic mother and a Protestant father. In Derry — the city where a 1969 street battle launched the Troubles — her parents' religions made the family a conspicuous target. During her youth, violence in Northern Ireland was commonplace. When she was 6, she writes, "a British soldier was shot dead six feet in front of" her. When she was 16, a good friend was murdered.

"Thin Places" follows ní Dochartaigh as she flees Northern Ireland and lives a "rootless" existence. She dulls her pain with alcohol. She attempts suicide several times. Eventually, for reasons she can't explain, she feels "called back" home. Brexit — Britain's decision to sever many of its ties to the European Union — incites renewed tension at the Ireland-Northern Ireland border, reminding her that peace isn't guaranteed.

She finds comfort in nature. "Thin Places" begins and ends with lovely glimpses of moths that "dance." The title invokes the ancient and elemental: "Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is ever shorter." Watching curlews in flight and sitting beneath old trees, she appreciates the "places that make us feel something larger than ourselves."

Ní Dochartaigh writes lyrical sentences, but she can be repetitive. Like moths, she writes, time itself "dances." So do words, flames, the Northern Lights, "the border between reality and nightmare," birds, memories and moments. "There are places that dance on the caves of our insides," she insists. This may be true, but good luck fact-checking it.

The same goes for much of this book. Even for a memoir — the genre is notoriously loose on what constitutes a fact — "Thin Places" is notable for its frequent dearth of specifics supporting her assertions. Writing of the murdered British soldier, for instance, she tells us that his death occurred "less than a minute's walk from" the home she lived in when writing part of this book. This is interesting, but as presented, it's not demonstrably true.

But ní Dochartaigh's commitment to confronting her pain is beyond dispute. "I wanted to hold them close," ní Dochartaigh writes of her memories, "to give them the room they needed — to give me the room I needed — to heal." Her book will inspire many trauma survivors.

Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York City.

Thin Places
By: Kerri ní Dochartaigh.
Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 280 pages, $24.