When Amy Liptrot moved to Berlin, she didn’t expect to spend so much time birdwatching. “I came for people, not birds,” she writes in her new memoir. But she buys a pair of secondhand binoculars and goes out in search of hooded crows, known as “hoodies” back in Scotland, and goshawks, numbers of which have recently increased across the city. For Liptrot, birdwatching is the ultimate antidote to scrolling on her phone, forcing her eyes to refocus and look into the distance.
The Instant is the author’s follow-up to her Wainwright prize-winning debut The Outrun (now being made into a feature film with Saoirse Ronan), and ostensibly tells of a year spent living in Germany, though this isn’t a straightforward travelogue. It is a slim, impressionistic, often melancholy work that, along with following her adventures in a new place, grapples with ideas of solitude, romance and a life lived simultaneously online and off. This book is not as substantial as its predecessor, though that is not a criticism. Where The Outrun chronicled her battles with addiction and her recovery on the islands of Orkney where she grew up, this feels like a more experimental project, a document of a liminal year in which her interior and exterior lives are keenly felt and recorded.
Liptrot moves to Kreuzberg, an arty district in Berlin where, along with watching birds, we find her doing yoga, loitering in cafes, searching for raccoons and obsessively tracking the lunar cycles. “I’ve run away but I find the moon everywhere I go,” she writes. She makes no bones about her loneliness and her need for physical connection: “Asking for new friendship is hard. Hearts and futures can turn on a single afternoon or an accepted invitation – but more often lead to nothing much themselves.”
Liptrot brings the same sharp eye to the urban landscape that she did to the wild environs of Orkney, reporting both on what she sees and the ways it is filtered through her imagination. She recalls how, while getting sober back home, she would take boat trips around the islands and swim in the sea to gaze at the life underwater. With Berlin about 200km from the sea, she seeks out water in swimming pools, lakes and saunas. In the vast nightclub Berghain, which was previously an electrical power plant, she finds “the dancefloor is the seabed and I am scuba-diving”.
Her writing is contemplative, but comes with pleasing flashes of grit and humour. It’s with mounting mortification that she dissects the rituals of modern dating, observing “the pretence of first dates when you talk about where his first flat in the city was or the mildness of the winter, anything apart from sex or reproduction or love or the bottomless ache that made you sign up to a dating website in the first place and willingly endure the indignity of walking into a bar with a nervous stomach and going to the bathroom and looking in the mirror at your sorry fucking face”.
In the spring, Liptrot meets a man and falls in love, and her account of their affair is vivid and heady. When they go camping in the forest, her phone battery runs out and for once she doesn’t care. They make plans to move to Scotland together; babies are even mentioned. But in late summer he breaks things off via email and she is devastated, and becomes umbilically attached to her phone again.
The book reveals much about the effects of growing up online: Liptrot delights in “travelling in bed”, referring to her hours spent wandering cities on Google Street View. But she also finds the affair that has left her broken-hearted isn’t easily left behind. Her agony is compounded by her addictive tendencies, which prompt her to search out her former lover in old texts, WhatsApp messages and on his social media accounts.
At the heart of The Instant is a yearning for new experiences, and for love and connection, with all the vulnerability that entails. On the face of it, these are unremarkable impulses but, in this intimate memoir, Liptrot’s achievement lies in making them feel remarkable.
• This article was amended 23 March 2022 to correct Berlin’s distance from the sea, given in an earlier version as 600km.
• The Instant by Amy Liptrot is published by Canongate (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
