Since I can remember, I have carried around a book in my bag. More often than not, in a black backpack. In the 90’s, I had what was called a “spider” bag, a miniature thing held by long, thin straps that crept up your shoulder blades. Now, it’s a large, sturdy one with painted peacocks and the words ‘ilmon bas karīn on the front pockets. The books in my bag are a source of great comfort: with them I am never alone, never without an escape hatch, an absorbing distraction, a trusty companion. I barely read now – I have two young children and a smartphone – but every so often the book companion in my bag speaks so intimately, so compellingly to me that I am filled with the same familiar security I felt as a lonely teenager. Of having a secret friend that is all mine. While the world whirls around me – spilling drinks, knocking into tables, utterly unaware in its automatic momentum – I might find myself quietly reading a sentence that has stopped me in my tracks, arresting and startling my brain, softly shifting and remaking something inside me. Inevitably, a child will clamber into my lap and thrust me back into reality, yet that momentary flight of fancy, the tickle in my brain, the stir in my soul will abide. Most recently, this special book was a memoir titled A Flat Place by Noreen Masud.

A Flat Place follows Masud’s long-standing fascination with flat landscapes and, in treading these terrains, builds a picture of her childhood and an unyielding sensation of flatness that inhabits her being. The book begins with mysterious, “perfectly, shimmeringly flat” fields near the author’s home in bustling Lahore which she passed in the car on her way to school. She calls this elusive image “the base her life stands upon” and pursues the kernel of this memory until it blooms into a lengthy, meticulous study. With her three sisters and Scottish-born mother cramped in a single bedroom, windows guarded with bars and chicken-wire, Masud grows up under the towering gaze of her father until she is suddenly and arbitrarily exiled to England at the age of fifteen. The extravagant emptiness of the flat fields contrasted with Masud’s claustrophobic, tightly-controlled domestic life sets the tone for the unique journey of the book. Surveying landscapes across Britain, Masud scrutinizes and contends with her interior life, her diagnosis of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (cPTSD), her relationship with her family, and her past. Masud embodies the curiosity and rigor of a scientist, armed with her knowledge of literature and lore, her research on history and topography. And yet the text is decidedly literary: tender, poetic, and poignant. There is much to admire in this slim book, but it is Masud’s exploration of “flatness” as a phenomenon, how she sucks the marrow out of the imagery and symbolism of the flatlands with such singular focus and tenacity, that I found most remarkable.

The mere act of looking closely and paying attention feels revolutionary in our increasingly media-saturated landscape. Focus, silence, sparseness, solitude are antithetical to an attention economy that strategizes attracting eyeballs and maximizing clicks per second. A Flat Place reveres and reaffirms the power of quiet observation. Masud celebrates, too, the unassuming character of the open plains in contrast to more dramatic natural landscapes. Unlike mountains, for instance, which contain a surge, a summit, a plunge, a sense of danger and achievement, flat lands “don’t do anything.” Masud is bewitched by the bareness of the flat scene and imbues it with a spirit of defiance, with “refusing to rise into anything.” “A flat place,” she says, “helps us to reimagine what it means for something to ‘happen’ and to rethink what it means for something to ‘matter.’” These sprawling stretches of land that lack a focal point, a landmark to organize the space and orient the eye, become a way, too, of understanding Masud’s cPTSD, where no singular event is the root of the trauma. She penetrates through the flat surface and, in doing so, brings long-buried parts of herself to the fore.

The act of beholding is a full body experience for Masud as she senses sun and sky, texture and shadow, shades of green and brown, the crunch of pebbles, the touch of the wind, with the devotion of a mystic. Walking through the fens she describes coming across “[a] green so vivid I could feel it almost physically against my cheek, cold and fragrant and damp.” Upon seeing a small island leveled with the water, she says: “I wanted to snap off a piece with my teeth and feel it on my tongue.” Masud creates a strange synesthetic alchemy in the motion between the exterior and interior, in how the environment liquefies into the body. The author, who struggles with both emotional attachment and physical touch, is able to generate empathy, connection, and sensual electricity with her expression. The text teems with deliciously uncanny analogies, page after page of deeply felt observations, and just when you think that Masud has exhausted all possible ways of looking at a barren plot of land, she introduces a turn so fresh, so sharp, and so stirring it takes your breath away.

And yet, Masud’s “nature writing” is not florid or indulgent. The narrative bubbles with tension and uncertainty; each discovery is undercut by doubts and fears. Flatlands can be secretive and treacherous too, says Masud, quicksand lurking underfoot. The memoir reads like the opposite of a “tell-all”: the recollections of her childhood are hazy — fleeting glimpses, flashes and fragments — and her tone carries a peculiar reserve. At times, the text grows so quiet that the reader may feel embarrassed to be trespassing. I felt frustrated by her withholding and impenetrability at first, and found myself growing greedy for details of the abusive childhood she obliquely referred to. It slowly became clear, however, that the book would not build towards big reveals; no climactic peaks would be scaled. Instead, the story simmers and spreads, gathering images and insights and growing concentrically. There is an arc, but it is faint. There is growth, but it is gentle and faltering. Masud explains that her book almost inadvertently became a meditation on her psyche and past; she had initially set out simply to study flat landscapes and all the rest of it seeped out in the process. “Something was beating its wings at the edge of my memory,” she says, “trying to get in, like a bird hitting a window.” The text reads as a raw, stumbling, spontaneous process of discovery that the author and reader seem to experience simultaneously.

I spent my university years reading authors steeped in existential dread and swept up in linguistic showmanship, but formal experiments and magical realism now leave me winded. My gaze has turned earthward, and I am increasingly drawn to women’s memoirs: stories of motherhood and marriage, families and relationships. The narrator’s persona in The Flat Place, however, is neither maternal nor romantic, not whimsical or humorous or particularly charming. She is — refreshingly — not seeking to inspire or educate, to plead her case, or to even be accepted. And yet the sensitivity of her gaze, the concentration that she accords to tender details and quiet moments, inspires an orientation of care towards the world. She observes her mother eating crisps with abandon, she palpates a soft rabbit’s jaw buried in moss, she dwells on the sensations in her tightened stomach over the course of her life. She rarely shares dialogue with her characters and yet she draws evocative and memorable images of even the most minor figures in her story: her dhoti-clad grandfather pacing the corridors, a precocious little girl shepherded by her father through marshy Morecambe Bay. Masud’s gaze, what she attends to and how earnestly, becomes the site of her self-realization, her illumination, her grieving and healing.

A Flat Place conjures an ethics of looking — looking towards the past, regarding the stranger who walks beside you, noticing the ground on which you tread. It is a small miracle of a memoir that will remind me to always keep a book in my bag. A grease-stained paperback, lovingly adorned with my daughters’ doodles, to remind me that, as the world whirls around me, it is always possible – and so unmistakably joyful – to be quiet and solitary, to be slow and deliberate, and to have a flat, black-and-white page erupt rhapsodic, technicolor drama in the imagination.