Which can make living with the exposure of these revelations quite uncomfortable at times for the everyday me! You’re trying to be a vessel through which you can transcribe and put into words the experience of being there and what that might have felt like for other people.

The definition of Hermit isn't so much the sticking to the constraints of a 'religious practice' but, infact, epitomised by the desire to isolate oneself from the myriad of societal constraints, and sadly the people that can make life toxic.Through conversations with other hermits across the world, Fitton sheds light on the myriad - and often misunderstood - ways of living alone: from monks to hikikomori, and the largely ignored female hermit. They asked if she might sue me for writing that she took LSD and walking into Trinity College Chapel.

In Hermit you’re balancing two very different things: the abusive relationship you were in, with this need to be solitary, although it feels essential to our understanding of the present day to know where you’d come from. The desire to retreat from modern society and live someplace quiet has always been there for me, although I’ve not acted on it (yet! In Hermit , Fitton has actually created that very thing for which she yearns: a place of serenity and calm and reflection. Just a very beautiful book about overcoming trauma, finding yourself, and what it means to be a human and live life well. The story of her breaking out of that relationship, taking time to be alone and learning to love and trust herself/others again was the main story arc.But a couple of years after that piece was published an agent got in touch having read my piece and asked to hear more about my story – his response was: this is a book! The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. By the end, I still felt she hadn’t quite found what she was after – although from where she started, she was in a much better place. But you can't really start self-identifying as a hermit when you don't actually live out in the wilds alone, cut off from civilisation.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. If you don’t have a boyfriend or your friends around, or children, you’re seen as crazy or lonely, or sad. I am a sucker for a memoir about nature and isolation, and this is up there with the best I have read.Compton said: “I’m so pleased to be publishing Hermit, a passionate memoir about the push and pull of solitude and society. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. This meant I was interested in hermits and recluses and the question of where, if anywhere, I fitted in—I was always most interested in those, like myself, that didn’t fit the hermit archetype of ‘old man with beard in the woods’, I wanted to explore people on the fringes who had been overlooked by both recent and ancient history. Still, even knowing that, I was not prepared for how comforting and simultaneously uncomfortable it was to read.