Across the pages of Amy Liptrot’s new memoir, The Instant, the moon slowly follows us: in the app she has downloaded on to her phone to chart the phases of its orbit; passing through the sky, just visible from the windows of her apartment in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district; and in the subheadings she has awarded to each chapter (Thunder Moon, Hunger Moon, Strawberry Moon). It is the book’s steady presence: ancient and constant in an otherwise dislocated tale of fevered love in the digital age.
Today, Liptrot, 40, stands in the kitchen of her terraced house in Yorkshire, making tea on a cold midmorning. Tall and pale and slender, she is something like a sliver of moonlight herself – if the moon wore pink cords and a violet top and spoke with a silvery Orcadian accent.
