Ring of Salt: A Memoir of Finding Home and Hope on the Wild Coast of Ireland

Maid meets Under the Tuscan Sun in this inspiring memoir about a writer and mother who flees an abusive marriage and must learn to reclaim the story of her life through a search for home, purpose, and community on Ireland’s wild, western coast.

At twenty-four, Betsy Cornwell runs away to Ireland. Leaving behind a painful past and chasing her lifelong dream of becoming a novelist, she finds a fresh start on the misty shores of the Aran Islands. Amid the beauty of the Irish countryside, her life takes on the glow of a fairy tale when she meets a charming horse trainer and elopes to Gretna Green.

Five years later, her happy ending has twisted into a nightmare and Betsy finds herself trapped in an abusive marriage, isolated and afraid with a newborn baby. On her son’s first birthday, she runs away, turning to the women around her—her local domestic violence group, a trusted family friend, and an online Smith College alumnae network—for help she’d never known she could ask for.

After a brush with homelessness, she struggles to scrape together a living for herself and her son, while her ex’s continuing harassment and threats of deportation keep her at risk of permanent separation from her child. On sleepless nights, she scrolls through real estate listings that might as well be castles in the air, and starts to foster an impossible dream: What if she could use her writing to buy a home of her own, one that no one could take away from her and her baby? One that might become a haven, not just for her family, but other single parent artists and writers, too?

When she discovers a historic knitting factory and former cinema on Ireland’s rugged Connemara coastline, left empty and crumbling for years, that precarious dream becomes her lifeline. Over the next two years she works to crowdfund the old knitting factory’s purchase by sharing its story and her own with her growing online community. But as the deadline to buy nears, she realizes she will have to reckon with everything she believes about family, survival, and what happily-ever-after truly means for her dream to have any chance of coming true.

Ring of Salt combines a powerful and all-too-relatable narrative of survivorship and healing with lush writing about the wild landscapes and rich mythology of rural Ireland to craft a real-world fairy tale about ordinary, but no less life-changing, magic we can all vulnerability, community, and the power of telling your own story.

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