Hermit: A memoir of finding freedom in a wild place

Product Information

This book was recommended to me by a friend just as I was starting a three month sabbatical from work.

And that helped me accept that my experience was valid, which was something that had been denied to me at the time. Just a very beautiful book about overcoming trauma, finding yourself, and what it means to be a human and live life well.It’s an honour pulled straight from my wildest dreams to be publishing my first book with Heinemann Hutchinson.

A really healing, beautiful read for anybody who has experience with a toxic relationship and rural escape particularly. It was the closest I’ve been to tripping without being on drugs, the closest I’ve got to experiencing time-travel. Living in a wild, remote place surrounded by nature sounds like heaven to me – although I’m not sure how the rest of my household might feel about it. 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.You always think your experience is yours and yours alone and no one else will have gone through that, but I think the best memoirs are the ones that probably divulge a little bit too much, because that’s what makes it feel real and how people connect to it. It’s the psychological behaviour of the insecure controller of such toxicity and there’s no protection from it empathy if not sympathy is the way the first part of the book reads for me. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. A duty to not put them through any more discomfort or pain than I felt was necessary to tell the story. It appealed to me immediately as an appropriate read just as I myself was withdrawing from my daily life for a period of reflection.

Through conversations with other hermits across the world, Fitton sheds light on the myriad – and often misunderstood – ways of living alone: from monks to hikikomori, and the largely ignored female hermit. When someone close to me suggested writing this book might help other people I dodged the notion like a jinx. How time passes at a different rate when you're alone, she says, and how you are better able to access memories.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. She cleans holiday homes in the town she grew up in, all the while writing and longing to escape everything for a life is solitude and nature. As the former, I found it rather odd but, as the latter, there were lots of interesting thoughts and ideas about isolation.

The Bookseller * Written with often startling beauty, Hermit is an intimate account of the healing power of solitude.Which can make living with the exposure of these revelations quite uncomfortable at times for the everyday me! Jade writing is so evocative, and she did a wonderful job at allowing even more of her personality to shine through her reading.