There’s a whole industry built around the “escape to the wild” story. City sickens you, island heals you, end of. Readers get their salt-air therapy and go back to their heated flats feeling purified. Tamsin Calidas walks into that expectation and wrecks it. I Am an Island isn’t a cosy reset narrative. It’s a record of what happens when you strip your life down to rock, weather, animals, and the brutal fact that belonging is never granted just because you’ve fallen in love with a view.
Calidas arrives on a remote Hebridean island as an outsider with a romantic hunger—like most people who flee a city and tell themselves it’s about “simplicity.” Then the book does what good writing should: it makes the romance pay rent. Crofting isn’t a mood. Isolation isn’t a minimalist lifestyle choice. The land is indifferent, the work is punishing, the body breaks, money vanishes, relationships strain, and the social fabric of a small community tightens in ways that don’t care about your feelings. This is the point: the wild doesn’t exist to be your personal recovery centre. It exists as a witness. It keeps score. It watches you learn the hard difference between wanting a place and being able to live inside it without turning everyone else into background props.
The ugliness isn’t just weather and labour. It’s people. And that’s where the book gets its teeth. Calidas writes the human side of island life without the usual rural postcard manners—no tasteful “colourful locals,” no community-as-charm, no flattering myth that smallness automatically equals kindness. She shows what happens when you’re visible, when everyone knows your business, when judgement travels faster than help. That honesty is exactly why the book caused anger. Good. A nation obsessed with heritage loves the idea of tough islanders right up until the toughness is shown as cruelty, suspicion, or punishment. Everyone wants “authentic community” until the community decides you’re not one of them.
The wild in Calidas isn’t a backdrop for transformation; it’s an unblinking witness that refuses to sentimentalise you, and that refusal is the only honest kind of grace.
The tenderness in her work is strange because it isn’t comfort. It’s practical mercy: an animal depending on you, a small ritual that keeps you upright, a moment of attention so precise it feels like a rope thrown across a chasm. In I Am an Island, tenderness exists alongside deprivation and loneliness, not as a counterweight but as proof that life still insists on relationship even when you’re stripped raw. That’s a harder truth than the usual nature-writing sermon. It doesn’t sell “healing.” It shows survival, with all the compromises that word contains.
Her later book A Wilder Voice sharpens the same argument with words and photography: the landscape isn’t a spiritual brand, it’s a force that changes you whether you asked it to or not. There’s a temptation, especially in the nature memoir boom, to treat the wild as a stage where the self performs suffering for enlightenment points. Calidas’s best moments reject that vanity. The land isn’t there to ennoble you. The land just is. If anything redeems you, it’s the work you’re willing to do without applause—and the honesty you’re willing to keep when the story stops flattering you.
This is where I’ll be blunt about the readers who come to books like hers looking for “beautiful writing about hardship.” That appetite is a problem. It turns deprivation into an aesthetic experience. It makes other people’s difficult lives into a cleanse. Calidas’s writing fights that tendency when it’s at its strongest: when it refuses neat uplift, refuses to make pain meaningful, refuses to paint poverty or illness as a pathway to wisdom. The brutality isn’t there to impress you. It’s there because it happened, and because pretending otherwise is how we keep consuming places and people without consequences.
If you treat belonging as something a landscape owes you, you’ll end up using the wild as a mirror and the community as a chorus—Calidas writes to stop you doing that.
Read her for the argument beneath the elements: belonging is negotiated, not bestowed. The wild doesn’t heal you; it exposes you. And if you want to talk about “escape,” start by admitting what you’re escaping from—and who pays when you arrive somewhere else demanding a new life. Keep the witness. Keep the honesty. Keep insisting that the wild is not your brand.
