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My Book ‘Drystone - A Life Rebuilt’ - 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.
‘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’
This week, debut author Kristie De Garis WhatsApped me from her bedroom office in her one-hundred and forty year old house in a Perthshire village. We spoke for two hours about her forthcoming memoir, Drystone: A life rebuilt (Birlinn, 2025) which is not, to be clear, just a book about drystone. I asked about the challenges of writing such an intimate memoir with themes of addiction, sexuality, manual labour, racism and feminism—and how she hopes her porn proclivities and intergenerational trauma will be received by the general public. This interview has been condensed for clarity.
Vikander: Hi, thanks for joining me. There’s so much to talk about! My first question is about the reader. What do you think we take away from reading this book?
De Garis: That change takes time, a lot of time, and a lot of fucking effort. But it's possible—huge change is possible.
Vikander: Usually we think of change as something happening suddenly. We say someone ‘had a eureka moment.’ But it took you longer?
De Garis: Yeah, those moments never existed for me. I've never experienced instant transformation. It’s more like planting a seed, and over a long time that seed grows into change. I used to think you had to be hard on yourself, but it’s not that. It’s a gentle firmness—boundaries.
Change is difficult, for the person changing, and usually for the people around them, too. So you have to push through that discomfort. Sobriety, relationships—I know I can’t go down certain paths because that might undo the changes or set me back. And when I look back and see how far I’ve come, there's a bit of patting myself on the back, but there is also a lot of respect for the work I’ve done. It reminds me what it took to get me here. If it came easily, maybe I wouldn’t be so keen to hold onto it.
Vikander: What was easy about writing your memoir?
De Garis: Fucking nothing. Hilariously, the easiest part was getting the book deal. I got a Twitter DM. I’ve kept the message. It said, “Have you ever thought about writing a book?” Yes, obviously, hasn’t everyone? Then, of course, I Googled Jamie Crawford because I was sure it was a scam. Even after I met him on Zoom and a few months after that, signed the contract, I was still like, “Wow, these scammers are really committed to the bit.” Sometimes I still think it! But if this were a scam, I’d have nothing but respect for them at this point.
Read More…
‘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 nighttime 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
‘There was a rhyme that I heard a lot in school. I don’t know if someone bestowed upon me the peculiar honour of having composed it specially, or if other kids across Scotland were subjected to it.
‘Hey, Pakistani, does your granny have a fanny?
Does it smell?
Fucking hell!’
The boys at the tuck shop began chanting this masterpiece of racism and misogyny, and as they approached me, the one with longish brown hair bent down and sniffed loudly between my legs.
‘It does smell . . .’ He stood up triumphantly. ‘Of curry!’
I died inside, but my anger took over, soothing me in a way I had learned to rely upon. ‘Fuck off,’ I said, in as casual a tone as I could muster.
They didn’t fuck off. Instead, they pelted me with pocket change at point blank range. I adopted a defensive stance, my eyes cast down while one hand protected my face. I listened to them shout ‘Paki’ as the coins fell around my feet like spent ammunition shells.
Puzzled by my outward insouciance or, more likely, having run out of low denomination currency, they eventually stopped and began to drift away. Waiting until their backs were turned, their attention on each other instead of me, I bent down. Hands shaking I tried, as quickly as I could, to pick up the copper pennies lying flat on the tarmac.
With their money tight in my fist, I walked to the tuck shop counter and used it to buy snacks, carefully counting it out to the shopkeeper, who was desperate to avoid my gaze. Heading back towards the main building, I felt sick as I tried to eat Space Raiders in a way that would convey victory, or at least indifference. I made it to the dark rooms in the art department before I began to cry.’
- Excerpt from Drystone - A Life Rebuilt, forthcoming from Birlinn/Polygon
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