WRITER
DRYSTONE - A LIFE REBUILT
pre-order now - Out August 2025
Kristie De Garis spent years running – from places, people and parts of herself. But chaos always followed.
When she moved to rural Scotland, she hoped to find peace. Instead, in the space and silence, she was forced to confront everything she had tried to escape: racism, trauma, undiagnosed ADHD, addiction and the stark realities of motherhood.
Then, in the land around her – and in the slow, stubborn craft of drystone walling – she began to see a different life. One that was quiet, deliberate, and her own.
Drystone: A Life Rebuilt is unflinchingly honest and unexpectedly funny. A story about the weight of the past, resilience and the hard work of living on your own terms.
Some things may never change. What matters is the life you build anyway.
Drystone – A Life Rebuilt is a memoir, but it’s not really about drystone walling.
It’s about the past and the hard work of rebuilding a life on your own terms.
I spent years running—from places, people, and parts of myself. But chaos always followed.
Growing up in the shadow of my family’s brutal experiences of racism, I faced my own—dodging racial slurs and pennies thrown by school bullies. I felt connected to the land and the stone beneath my feet, but not the people around me. By fifteen, I was drinking whatever was handed to me, drawn to the easy escape of alcohol, already drifting from the life I had imagined for myself.
A boyfriend? Cruel and controlling.
University? Tried and failed. Three times.
Then marriage and motherhood by twenty-one.
Through it all, I kept going—not gracefully, but going all the same.
In my thirties, I moved to rural Scotland, hoping to find peace. Instead, in the space and silence, I was forced to confront everything I had tried to leave behind: racism, trauma, undiagnosed ADHD, addiction, and the stark realities of raising two daughters amidst it all.
Healing In Nature
Set against the landscapes of Scotland—from the vast Flow Country in Caithness to the hills and fields of Perthshire—this memoir weaves together personal reflection, nature writing, and social commentary, framed by the steady, grounding work of drystone walling.
Drystone – A Life Rebuilt explores the hard work of rebuilding and nature’s quiet, grounding power—not as a magical cure, but as a place to find clarity.
And while the book isn’t about drystone walling, it isn’t just a backdrop either—it shapes the book itself. Each chapter is structured around a different part of a drystone wall, from the foundations to the hearting to the cope stones, mirroring the process of rebuilding a life. The work of walling—choosing the right stones, finding balance, accepting imperfections—became an unexpected framework for understanding my own story.
Not a Neat Redemption Story
Healing isn’t a finish line. It’s slow, deliberate work in a world that refuses to change. Like drystone walling, it’s about persistence, not perfection.
This book is both deeply personal and profoundly universal—a story about what is passed to us and what we choose for ourselves. And it's a book for readers looking for something more than nature’s gentle healing.
Through unflinching honesty and unexpected humour, Drystone - A Life Rebuilt acknowledges that some wounds never fully heal, racism persists, mental health struggles don’t vanish with a diagnosis, relationships remain imperfect, and raising children while healing yourself is complicated. For me, recovery isn’t a before-and-after story—it’s an ongoing process, slow and deeply human.
Drystone offers a clear and unsentimental take on trauma and recovery—one that doesn’t pretend healing is neat, or that the world makes it easy.
Beyond Recovery—Race, Class, Land, and Family
But Drystone isn’t just a story about recovery—it’s about race and belonging, class, the land. Nature isn’t always a place of escape, and the land isn’t just for fleeting feelings of wonder—for many, it’s for life, for work.
This is also a book about family—the kind anyone can recognise—where, even with the best intentions, love and harm are inseparable, closeness and distance exist together, all at once, and the past often looms large.
For those who don’t see themselves in the linear, wrapped-up-in-a-bow type of recovery stories, Drystone is something different. It tells the messy, unfiltered truth. It’s raw. It’s angry. It’s tender. It’s lucid. It’s about rebuilding—however you can, with whatever you have, one step, or one stone, at a time.
‘In drystone, the finished product is directly related to physicality. There’s no separating the two. Looking at what I’d built, I knew without any doubt that my body had brought it into existence. This wall wasn’t just my first contribution to the long tradition of drystone in Scotland. No. It was something indisputable. A demonstration of the undeniable value of my physical form. Put simply, when I realised I could build a wall that would last hundreds of years, men wanting to fuck me felt a little irrelevant.’
- Excerpt from Drystone - A Life Rebuilt, forthcoming from Birlinn/Polygon
Interview
‘Drystone - A Life Rebuilt’
‘Standing lonely somewhere outside Halkirk, Frank’s house was a tiny, loaf-like structure that sat so low in the moorland it looked like it might be sinking. Huddled within the metre-thick, solid stone walls were a few deep-set windows that were visible only at night, when interior light illuminated their positions in the dark. I don’t remember doors, instead heavy, faded curtains hung on sagging rails. Wires snaked the walls, secured occasionally with white tape curling and blackened at its edges.
Laid in huge squares, flagstone floors ran throughout the building. Ripples, the influence of water frozen in time, disrupted their surface, making them look like a night-time riverbed. Ice cold in winter, the slabs warmed as the ground did, and in summer you could walk on it without socks, feeling every lithic detail beneath your feet. The stone was always warmest around the hearth where peat, cut in blocks from the land, fuelled a fire, the sole source of heat in Frank’s home. A permanent draught from the front door excited ash in the grate and sent dancing particles through the air to settle all over the house.
Frank, although not particularly houseproud, seemed to think the flagstone warranted special treatment. First he’d sweep, paying particular attention to the indentations between the stones. Then, fetching a bottle of milk from the fridge, he’d fill a small bowl with the cold liquid and carefully set it down beside him. Soaking the corner of an old red rag, he’d gently wave this cloth across the floor – and the flags, at first dusty and dull, would reappear from beneath the cloth, an oil-slick of dark, shining stone.’
- Excerpt from Drystone - A Life Rebuilt, forthcoming from Birlinn/Polygon
‘I’d spent the last few years slowly piecing together that we were poor. While my brother Matthew and I would eat dinner at the table, Mum would work around us in our small kitchen. I had assumed she was too busy to eat, that she would serve herself later; but one day, sitting in the living room, kitchen door ajar, I saw her scrounging leftovers from our plates. When the school sent a letter requesting that we bring an apron to cover our clothes for art class, my mum announced, dragging out the sewing machine and cutting up one of her old dresses, that we would not be buying anything. At school the next week, I watched as our teacher tied bows behind twenty plain pinnies in bold, block colours while I struggled with blouson sleeves and billows of floral nylon. Yes, it was the eighties.
I’d seen how kids from Jedburgh’s rich families were automatically popular in school, how the staff spoke of their parents with respect. I tried to ignore the comments about my father’s absence and how my mum was trying to steal people’s husbands. At Halloween we made sure to stick to streets that looked like ours. We didn’t dare venture into the cul-de-sacs where people had red-brick bungalows, gardens so sprawling they could accommodate full-grown trees, separate garages with brand-new Volvos inside.
So, pulling up to our new home that rainy Tuesday, I was impressed. Four large triangular sections of gable end protruded from a vast white frontage, and the main door was wide as a car. A mansion! It had its own glass-panelled foyer and its tall corridors were bordered by wooden doors. Like an expensive hotel from a film. Even the name sounded like it was from a story. Fairview.
Maybe in Caithness we were rich.’
-Excerpt from Drystone - A Life Rebuilt, forthcoming from Birlinn/Polygon
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