Ring of Salt is the debut memoir by New York Times bestselling novelist Betsy Cornwell. Her memoir was released simultaneously in both the US and the UK/Ireland in 2025.
Ring of Salt details Cornwell’s decision to move to western Ireland from the US after university, seeking somewhere new and safe after surviving childhood abuse. While there, she meets a charming Irishman named Tommy, who works with horses. On paper, he’s perfect—he’s kind and loving, a feminist by his own admission—and the two marry quickly. Though their story sounds like a happy ending, the relationship begins to sour as Tommy becomes increasingly more erratic, angry, and threatening, behavior made doubly scary when Cornwell becomes pregnant with their son, Robin.
The arc in Ring of Salt deals with questions about abuse, domestic violence, survivorship, and single motherhood as Cornwell is eventually forced to leave the family home with infant Robin, fearing for their safety. Much of the memoir is devoted to the various ways in which she tries to give Robin what neither she nor Tommy had: a gentle childhood, one without abuse and fear. One such attempt occurs via her rental, and eventual purchase, of the Old Knitting Factory, a historic building in rural Connemara.
Ring of Salt does not focus on queerness, but it is informed by Cornwell’s bisexuality, as she noted in a 2025 Instagram post. The book itself explicitly mentions sexuality a few times, often in discussing Cornwell’s novels, many of which are queer retellings of folklore and fairytales. This includes her most recent novel, the 2022 title Reader, I Murdered Him, based on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which features a bisexual main character in Adele Varnes.
In terms of queerness outside of her writing, Cornwell briefly discusses her bisexuality in Ring of Salt in Chapter 13, in which she joins a “trans-inclusive queer dating app” and also goes on a date with another bisexual woman. Described as “the only other out, bi, single woman my age I’d met in Galway”, things seem promising initially but then fizzle out.
Early excerpts of Ring of Salt received the Markievicz Award, designed to support Irish artists, in 2024. Literary magazine Hippocampus Magazine likened the book to “talking to an old friend on the phone.” The Irish Independent called it “addictive.” Material from the memoir appeared in a New York Times Modern Love essay in January 2023, titled “I’ll Get By With a Little Help From My Herd.”