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 and lyrical 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 on Ireland’s wild, western coast.

At twenty-four, Betsy Cornwell runs away to Ireland for a fresh start. Leaving behind a painful past, she chases her dream of becoming a novelist to the misty shores of the Aran Islands. There she meets a handsome and charming horse trainer, and her life takes on the glow of a fairy tale when they elope to Gretna Green.

Five years later, her happy ending has twisted into a nightmare. Betsy is trapped in an abusive marriage, isolated and afraid with a newborn baby. On her son’s first birthday, she must flee home again, this time turning to the women around her--her local survivor support 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. 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, 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, in candid posts that range from the unexpectedly steep learning curves she encounters with home renovations and internet dating, to her heartbreaking fight to keep custody of her son, 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 relatable narrative of survivorship and healing with lush writing about the windswept landscapes and rich mythology of rural Ireland to craft a real-world fairy tale about the ordinary, but no less life-changing, forms of magic we can all access: vulnerability, community, and the power of telling your own story.

Betsy Cornwell is a New York Times bestselling author, writing professor, private mentor, and retreat leader. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Notre Dame and a BA from Smith College, and she currently teaches writing at the University of Galway; the Yeats Academy of Art, Design, and Architecture; Kylemore Abbey; and online.