Cacophony of Bone

September 25, 2023
In this lyrical memoir, nature writer Dochartaigh (Thin Places) documents the year she and her partner spent in a cottage “by the central bogland, in the quiet, solitary heart of Ireland.” Much of Dochartaigh’s isolation comes courtesy of the Covid-19 pandemic, but she gets a head start, newly sober and fleeing Derry with her lover after suffering a string of disappointments in the early days of 2020. Organized by month, Dochartaigh’s dispatches recount her experience tuning into the earth’s natural cycles and learning she’s pregnant after “a decade and a half of making peace with not being a mother, then a month and a half of making peace with trying.” Her often-breathtaking meditations on gardening, time (“To write is to take the idea of time and smash it into millions upon millions of miniscule pieces,” she observes, taking critic Al Alvarez’s observation that Sylvia Plath’s poetry reads “as though written posthumously” a step further), and the natural world beautifully capture the vertigo of life in 2020, though concrete details are sometimes frustratingly difficult to discern beneath the abstraction. This fragmented, emotionally intense, and hard to forget memoir mirrors the period it describes.