Romancing the stone wall

We all tell stories about ourselves, every one of us. ‘I’m a useless cook.’ ‘Spiders don’t scare me.’ Not all these stories are true, but then self-perception has never held much truck with truth. Our stories are our own,to hold, repeat and believe in.

But what if your story isn’t your own? What if you start out on life’s journey and discover that your story is, in fact, someone else’s? This deeply unsettling scenario provides the driving narrative to this confessional, heartfelt, if somewhat scatty memoir.

Whitney Brown was, as we’re frequently reminded, an A-star student, a valedictorian. Growing up in small-town South Carolina, she was the kid deemed ‘most likely to succeed’. But at what?

There’s the rub. She was born into a hard-working, lower middle-class family, just a generation between her and cotton-picking poverty, and her destiny seemed sealed. University, post-graduate degree, respectable job — and thus the comfortable, white-collar life her predecessors could only dream about.

Only, in true millennial style, Brown decides to write her own script. So she turns down a job at the Smithsonian (read: status, security, ‘success’) and decides, on a whim, to take herself off to mid-Wales to learn the ancient art of stone walling (read: brave but ‘crazy’).

Her thinking: ‘Wales did not have money to offer me — but what it did have was adventure and intrigue. And, to be honest, money has always bored me.’ Unsurprisingly, what she discovers on arrival reflects back this new narrative she has decided to tell about herself. So the Wales of her experience is a nation of numbing ‘pastoral glory’, where even the rain and mist could be forgiven for the ‘drama they added’.

There is adventure and intrigue aplenty. At the heart of the book is a very touching yet ill-fated love affair with her walling mentor — ‘a scholar, a poet, a warrior’ — who is twice her age and, as it transpires, not keen on marriage.