Hermit: A memoir of finding freedom in a wild place

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It was the closest I’ve been to tripping without being on drugs, the closest I’ve got to experiencing time-travel. Your emotions, your soul, are entangled in it, but you’ve still got to get up everyday and meet it— there is no other way.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Through conversations with other hermits across the world, Fitton sheds light on the myriad - and often misunderstood - ways of living from monks to hikikomori, and the largely ignored female hermit. To protect myself emotionally I had to remove the vulnerable part of myself while writing it—disconnect from it, which I think anyone who’s gone through a trauma develops a (slightly unhealthy) knack of. A blend of memoir, nature writing and a re-examination of women throughout history who have sought solace in solitude, Jade Angeles Fitton has written a stunning and original book about loss, love and overcoming one's demons.For her own life, struggling to find somewhere to live, she comes to understand certain features of simplicity and isolation. So, hmm, an enjoyable read for the nature aspects but the constant self-referencing as a hermit got a little annoying if I'm honest.

And that helped me accept that my experience was valid, which was something that had been denied to me at the time.Reading it, I felt the overheated racket of the world recede, even as I attained further knowledge of its workings. I didn’t because I didn’t want people to have to read anything painful about me if it wasn’t going to get cleared through legal. Along the way, she demonstrates her love of nature, and her growing understanding that isolation can be powerful and not necessarily something to be feared or avoided.