RUNAWAY

by Lucy Irvine ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 30, 1987

Memoirs of an Englishwoman's childhood and youth, a follow-up to her first book, Castaway (1984), that recounted her life after answering a want ad for a ""wife"" to spend a year on on uninhabited tropical island. The book is the epitome of ""painfully honest"" writing. The narration begins with an escape from a grade school. The 12-year-old skips out of Latin class, dumps her school uniform, checks in with her father at work--he more or less nods approvingly--and then hitchhikes across the country, finally joining up with some acid-dropping motorcycle youths, smashing a motorcycle and ending up in the hospital. The lesson? Plan better next time. These escapades--more follow--are presented as reckless, carefree, in search of identity, running from the dissolution of her parents' marriage; but it is too simple to see through her self-romanticizing delusions. There is far more at work here than a broken family. Allowed to drop out of school after school, she was taught a false sense of freedom that society could not match. It is pathetically predictable as the tragedies begin to pile up: a rape, a breakdown, her sister's anorexia and alcoholism, a near-fatal break-up with a pseudo-intellectual Svengali. The best parts of the book are the travelling sections, where the veneer of objectivity gives her emotional turmoil some subtlety and resonance. The story of her days in a tiny Greek fishing village is extraordinary. This is an original, unprocessed and unpretentious text, much like a diary. Unfortunately, the naivetÉ is lost as the writing often becomes embarassingly precious, particularly on a poetry-spouting boyfriend and in the gratuitous and self. conscious depictions of sex. Freedom can be a curse; even as the narrator would be the heroine of her own life, we can only see her as victim.

Pub Date: March 30, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1987

Categories: NONFICTION