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Published Apr 2014
256 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
In middle age, Ehrenreich came across the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence and set out to reconstruct that quest, which had taken her to the study of science and through a cataclysmic series of uncanny - or as she later learned to call them, "mystical" - experiences. A staunch atheist and rationalist, she is profoundly shaken by the implications of her life-long search.
Part memoir, part philosophical and spiritual inquiry, Living with a Wild God brings an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's uninhibited musings on the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. Ehrenreich's most personal book ever will spark a lively and heated conversation about religion and spirituality, science and morality, and the "meaning of life."
Certain to be a classic, Living with a Wild God combines intellectual rigor with a frank account of the inexplicable, in Ehrenreich's singular voice, to produce a true literary achievement.
"Starred Review. Ehrenreich returns with vigor to her youthful quest, enlisting all of her subsequent scientific training to find an explanation for what had occurred to her as a girl." - Publishers Weekly
"A powerful, honest account of a lifelong attempt to understand that will please neither theists nor atheists." - Kirkus
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Barbara Ehrenreich was the author of more than 20 books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. She was a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, as well as a contributing writer to Time magazine.
She died in September 2022 aged 81. Her daughter said the cause was a stroke. She continued to write into her eighties leaving an unfinished work about the evolution of narcissism.
According to her New York Times obituary, Ms. Ehrenreich said she believed that her job as a journalist was to shed light on the unnecessary pain in the world: "The idea is not that we will win in our own lifetimes and that's the measure of us...but that we will die trying."
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