Reviewed by Elizabeth Austin

There are books you learn, after which there are books that learn you: books that attain into your coronary heart and extract experiences you thought have been yours alone, holding them as much as the sunshine so you may see them clearly. Betsy Cornwell’s (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster; September 2025) is that form of e book.

Ring of Salt traces Cornwell’s journey from a bright-eyed 24-year-old arriving in Eire to a lady navigating the treacherous waters of escaping from an abusive marriage, and finally, improbably, renovating an outdated knitting manufacturing facility as a single mother within the Irish countryside. It’s memoir as survival handbook, as love letter, and as witness assertion.

What strikes me most about Ring of Salt is Cornwell’s capacity to color abuse in all its maddening complexity. The e book explores the insidious spectrum of management, manipulation, and terror that characterizes so many relationships. She captures the actual horror of questioning, at all times, in case you’re being watched, of checking over your shoulder within the grocery store, of that split-second calculation each survivor is aware of — Is that his automotive? Is he following me? Did I simply think about it? Ring of Salt doesn’t sensationalize these moments; they play out on the web page with devastating readability, and in doing so, they validate an expertise that so many ladies have lived by way of in isolation.

Studying Ring of Salt felt like speaking to an outdated buddy on the telephone — the form of dialog the place you each begin ending one another’s sentences since you’ve been there, you realize. When Cornwell describes sitting in a room at COPE, listening to different survivors inform their tales, I used to be proper there together with her. I’ve sat in rooms like that. I’ve heard these tales. I’ve been a kind of tales. The popularity was nearly bodily.

Ring of Salt is a profound meditation on place and on how panorama can maintain us. The descriptions of Eire are luminous, loaded with such specificity and tenderness I felt I may attain out and contact the stone partitions of the knitting manufacturing facility, style the salt air on the shore, really feel the silvery moist sand of An Trá Mhór beneath my ft. When Cornwell describes the wild strawberries within the yard of the outdated knitting manufacturing facility, I used to be on the bottom together with her, staining my fingers crimson. When she seems to be out over the lake, I’m trying too, bathed in that specific high quality of Irish mild that appears to come back from in every single place and nowhere directly.

This interweaving of place and survival is among the e book’s best achievements. Eire isn’t only a backdrop for Cornwell’s story — it’s a personality, a refuge, and a trainer. The land affords her one thing her marriage couldn’t: steadiness, magnificence, and a way of belonging. As she slowly transforms the knitting manufacturing facility from spoil to house, we see her remodeling too, reclaiming her life one strawberry, one stone, one choice at a time.

Cornwell is sincere about what it takes to go away, and what comes after. She exhibits us the messy, non-linear actuality of therapeutic: setbacks, small victories, moments of doubt, the gradual accumulation of braveness that comes with time. She acknowledges the individuals who helped — together with the digital Friday Tea group, borne out of her time at Smith School. I used to be reminded that whereas leaving takes super particular person energy, it additionally requires neighborhood.

What I respect most about Ring of Salt is its generosity. Cornwell has written a e book that does the onerous work of bearing witness with out asking for pity. The e book exhibits vulnerability with out performing it. She affords us one thing treasured: permission to consider that we, too, can break ourselves free.

Ring of Salt swept me away the best way Eire sweeps you away: utterly, irrevocably, with a wild magnificence that stayed with me lengthy after I’d returned to strong floor.

Meet the Contributor

Elizabeth Austin’s writing has appeared in Time, Harper’s Bazaar, McSweeney’s, Narratively and elsewhere. She is presently engaged on a memoir about being a foul most cancers mother. She lives outdoors of Philly together with her two youngsters and their many pets. Discover her at writingelizabeth.com and on Instagram: @writingelizabeth.