Can what seems like an escape from grief and sadness actually be a path to healing?
In The Slow Road North, writer Rosie Schaap describes her winding path from spending most of her life as a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker to her final settlement in a small, far-flung town in Northern Ireland.
Schaap, an established journalist, teacher and occasional bartender in Brooklyn with a cozy apartment where she had lived for decades, seemed prepared for life as a New Yorker.
But the loss of her husband is a bitter loss for her. In 2010 he died of cancer and she became a widow at the age of 39. A little over a year later her mother, with whom she had a complicated relationship, also died. She is confronted with conflicting feelings that she is not dealing with her grief in the “right” way and longs for change.
Schapp has long been fascinated by Ireland, its poets, writers and history. After returning there for several years, in 2019 she decides to take a creative writing course in Belfast. She soon settles in Glenarm, a coastal town north of Belfast.
Facing a lot of skepticism – from her friends who wonder why she would give up her perfect apartment in Brooklyn, from Irish neighbors who wonder why an American would move to Glenarm, and even her own fear that she might be running away from her problems – Schaap gets involved in the Glenarm community, finding solace in the people, the landscape, and finding her place among new friends. She even starts a new love.
In her memoir, she peppers her own story with snippets of Irish poetry, folk tales, colorful descriptions of small-town characters, and the history of Irish travesties such as the 19th-century famine and the later decades of the sectarian conflict known as the Troubles. She details how Glenarm and Northern Ireland’s nuanced relationship with grief helps her confront her own.
“Moving would not ‘cure’ me, but a different way of life here, in this quiet and healing place, could bring healing to me too,” she writes.
___
AP Book Reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews
