The British author and adventurer Lucy Irvine found herself, from an early age, at odds with the expectations and conventions into which she was born. Uninterested in the structure of schooling, and feeling misunderstood by the therapists her family sent her to, she took on a series of odd jobs before eventually embarking on an adventure that would, in many ways, shape the rest of her life. In this short film from the Swedish director Jesper Wachtmeister, Irvine recalls her decision to spend 14 months on an uninhabited island in the Torres Strait between Australia and Papua New Guinea with an ‘arranged marriage husband’, as well as the strange sensation afterwards of re-entering the world of civilisation – exacerbated by the unexpected success of her book on the adventure, Castaway (1983).

Telling her story from the cluttered yurt in the Bulgarian countryside that she now calls home, Irvine explains why, throughout her life, she has chosen unconventional paths as a means of protecting herself from feeling overwhelmed by a modern world she saw as imbued with too many prescriptions and, indeed, too many choices. Far from a tale of romantic ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ self-actualisation through travel, Irvine instead offers her idiosyncratic outlook with unvarnished honesty, detailing preferences that some might find lonely or perhaps self-centred, but nonetheless tug at more universal tensions between drives for security, belonging and freedom.

Reset: Lucy is part of Wachtmeister’s film project to document stories about ‘the art of disappearing and the consequences of starting over’, which includes the instalment Reset: Bennie.