Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

by Barbara Ehrenreich

From the New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed comes a brave, frank, and exquisitely written memoir that will change the way you see the world.

Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the most important thinkers of our time. Educated as a scientist, she is an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice. In Living With a Wild God , she recounts her quest-beginning in childhood-to find ""the Truth"" about the universe and everything else: What's really going on? Why are we here? In middle age, she rediscovered the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence, which records an event so strange, so cataclysmic, that she had never, in all the intervening years, written or spoken about it to anyone. It was the kind of event that people call a ""mystical experience""-and, to a steadfast atheist and rationalist, nothing less than shattering.

In Living With a Wild God , Ehrenreich reconstructs her childhood mission, bringing an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's impassioned obsession with the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. The result is both deeply personal and cosmically sweeping-a searing memoir and a profound reflection on science, religion, and the human condition. With her signature combination of intellectual rigor and uninhibited imagination, Ehrenreich offers a true literary achievement-a work that has the power not only to entertain but amaze.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Religion, Spirituality, Philosophy, Biography, Biography Memoir

272 pages, Paperback

First published April 8, 2014

About the author

Barbara Ehrenreich was an American author and political activist. During the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She was a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist and the author of 21 books. Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a memoir of her three-month experiment surviving on a series of minimum-wage jobs. She was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and the Erasmus Prize.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Road to Damascus on US hwy. 395 in Central California

Barbara Ehrenreich lives in her head. So do I. I, and I think she, can’t imagine any other mode of living. We share, if that’s not too oxymoronic an idea, a solipsistic attitude toward the world in general - that it really is dependent upon my thinking it into existence. We both know that this is irrational and a social handicap. But the attitude is not a matter of choice. Through some combination of nature and nurture, it is our fate to live on a sort of cosmic stage-set on which we are the only motivating force, constantly questioning why the props are where they are, and who wrote the script.

The disadvantages of the solipsistic tendency are obvious: we appear enigmatic, aloof, self-possessed if not acutely self-absorbed. Inexplicably we also appear this way to ourselves which promotes a permanent state of doubt crossing frequently into cynicism. This mystically tinged otherness is perhaps our most annoying character trait as attested by parents, siblings, colleagues and ex-spouses. To find another who is similarly disordered is, paradoxically, a comfort; not because misery loves company but because Schadenfreude is a real thing: There is someone, thank goodness, who may be worse off, metaphysically speaking, than me.

Nonetheless there is a reason for our solipsistic existence. We can’t explain it, but we can describe it. This is a public service. Having just finished How Proust Can Change Your Life, Ehrenreich’s Living With a Wild God is the perfect example of de Botton’s thesis: an appreciation of one’s life cannot be rushed and demands a developed vocabulary. For Ehrenreich it was Conrad rather than Proust who provided an initial motivation, but her point is the same: writing about one’s life, particularly its most incomprehensible moments, eases the stress of living it.

And if one gives it enough time the result just might be a therapeutic document, therapeutic certainly for the author and, with any luck, for others who don’t have her linguistic talent, as inspiration as well as example. It is also very helpful as a means of constraining oneself from giving constant stage directions. Ehrenreich says, “The reason I eventually became a writer is that writing makes thinking easier, and even as a verbally underdeveloped fourteen-year-old I knew that if I wanted to understand ‘the situation,’ thinking was what I had to do.” ‘The situation’ of course is how things are connected in one’s head, which one comes to realize is only remotely connected to the stage-set.

This disconnection, what the cognitive psychiatric types condemn as dissociation, is a positive adaptation. It doesn’t make us any less annoying, but it does allow us to be functional in society. It also allows us to have our visions, aberrant perceptions, and various intellectual conceits without having to constantly explain the unexplainable. This is sufficient cause for those of us traveling in Ehrenreich’s psychic boat to read her memoir. She might even make subjective introversion respectable. Then again I wouldn’t count on any widespread support in an America grounded in belief and faith. “Belief is intellectual surrender;” she says, “‘faith’ is a state of willed self-delusion.” I think I’m in love.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had a lot of “aha” moments with this personal exploration of spirituality by a life-long atheist and scientist turned journalist. As a teenager she had some “mystical” experiences which challenged her highly rationale world view at the time. Going back to revisit the import of those experiences made for a fascinating journey of self-discovery. This is not a heavy philosophical exploration of ideas, but more of a brutally honest autobiographical account of how a person growing up in the 50’s and 60’s got settled into her life’s trajectory at the cost of neglecting the fountain of her youthful quest for the bigger questions. Circling back to her launch, she revives the wonder reflected in Vonnegut’s phrase: “Fish gotta swim. Bird gotta fly. Man gotta sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’ “

What she experienced starting about age 14 was some breaks in her hold on reality:
I might be in school, concentrating on Latin conjugations or logarithmic tables, and suddenly notice my fingers holding the pencil and realize I was looking at a combination of yellow and pink, of straight and curved, that had never been seen before and never would be seen again by anyone in the universe, not in this precise configuration anyway, and with that realization, all that was familiar would drain out of the world around me.

Looking at entries in her journal at the time, she can identify how her points of “stepping out” could be tagged by psychologists as classic “dissociation”. Yet she sees a lot of positive impact on her overall quest in life, and not something to write off as incipient mental illness. She was headed down a path of solipsism, questioning even the reality of other minds. Without the succor of God in her world view, she welcomed a sense of connection to something bigger:
At times like that I am not even real to myself. I don’t know where I am. My own thoughts are like a distant throbbing whisper. It is as if I am only consciousness and not an individual, both a part of and apart from my environment. Strange. Everything looks strange as if I’d never seen it before.

The budding scientist in her could recognize it as not so odd for ordinary perception to break down:
that I was just falling down on my job as a conscious human being, sort of like going on strike. Instead of attacking, say, trees with all the word power at my disposal, or dismissing them as too routine to merit attention and moving on to the next thing, I had let them run wild and speak for themselves. I, the point of consciousness tasked with organizing sensory data into a coherent reality, had temporarily ceased to exist. And whatever I saw, or thought I saw during those episodes was of no more significance than an optical illusion. …But I wasn’t ready to abandon the idea that I had gained a privileged glimpse into some alternative realm or dimension.

I imagine many readers would be bored by her issue as making mountains out of molehills. Yet, personally, I could identify with the journey of her self and appreciated the links she found between her seminal outlook in youth and the path she took toward science and later engagement in the plight of people in our modern culture. I only knew her from the splash she made with her book on the tough reality of people in the American working class (“Nickel and Dimed”) and her recent book criticizing the cult of positive thinking spawned by her own experience with breast cancer (“Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America”). Little did I know she had intense involvement in the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War or in the feminist movement and how surprising that was for someone who had long subjugated herself to the isolated life of a lab scientist (she got a doctorate in immunology from Rockefeller after long prior studies in chemistry).

The connections she made with her environment of growing up, her intellectual exploration of great thinkers and poets, her dabbling with Eastern philosophies, and the harnessing of her ambitions in science were fascinating to me because of some similar experiences I had. For example, from my growing up in the West, I could appreciate what captured about the impact of her early years in rural Montana:
Butte is where men went to escape from the sky. First they dug mines that ran a mile deep into the earth, which was about as far from the sky as you could get, and you had to be so desperate to get there that you’d risk being crushed in a collapsing tunnel or atomized in an explosion. …These are the lengths that men will go to avoid being eaten alive by the emptiness, or at least that’s how I began to see it as a child.

I loved feeling her struggle with basic ideas about life and death, as in this journal entry:
It seems to me that the principle psychological factor in living things was desire. … The problem is: is the purpose, essence, of desire no desire (as it certainly seems to be) or is the purpose in the incomplete [unfulfilled?] desire? Is the purpose of life death—or is it in living? Desire seems to be the unsatisfied longing for its own absence, in fact it is.

And I appreciated well her unromantic perspective on her own resilience in the face of family troubles and her ability to come to empathize with her parents’ shortcomings:
Ah, hell. Even now, insulated by so many intervening years, I could choke on the pity of it. They started so young and so brave, my parents, and ended up such sordid messes. Only one thing saved my father from dying as a slobbering drunk, and that was Alzheimer’s disease, alcohol being unavailable in the nursing home he finally expired in. As for my mother, she didn’t live long enough to find out I grew up to have all the things she craved …--the adventure, the causes, the friends and hot romances. She died, too, before we could settle the things between us, on her third suicide attempt.
…But if you are thinking this is the usual story of dysfunction and abuse, then I’m doing a poor job telling it … .Who am I, a former child, to tell the stories of the giants of the earth, whose ambitions propelled us from one city or state to another, bound to each other in our constant motion? …They were rebels too, and I respected that, even as I rebelled against them.

Her father, a mining engineer, she came to forgive for his emotional distance, seeing him as “that great man-god and Shiva-like genius of self-destruction. It was he, after all, who instructed me to always ask why, and thereby started, or at least abetted, the entire project.” In the end, Ehrenreich embraces the “why” as an outlook that inexplicably is bound up with, if not a “who”, at least an “other” behind the scenes that baffles any one’s attempt to digest what modern physics puts before us:
But the closer and more carefully we probe, the more it seethes with what looks like life—runaway processes driven by positive feedback loops, emergent patterns, violent attractions, quantum leaps, and always, as far ahead as we can see, more surprises.

As an atheist myself who has experienced epiphanies of mysterious connectedness to the universe, drug induced and not, and am now struck over the limitations of science, I do identify with the thrust of Ehrenreich’s journey. I place this book on the same mental shelf with certain others that opened my eyes to alternative ways of looking at the world, including Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard” and Dillard’s “Holy the Firm.” Sometimes it seems I am on the verge of pantheism.

This book was provided as an advance copy by the publisher as part of the Goodreads Giveaway program.

[Deborah Markus · Rating 1 out of 5]

The short version: This book started out good. Then it got boring. Then it got irritatingly tedious. Then it got offensively bad.

True fact: It's impossible to read while simultaneously rolling one's eyes, smacking the book in question on the nearest hard surface, and yelling, "Oh, come ON!" I was doing all of those things on a regular basis by the time I hit the halfway mark. That's why this book took me so long to finish, and why I'm going to have to pay a library fine on a book I hate. Which only makes me hate it more.

Specifics: Barbara Ehrenreich was an intelligent, sensitive child. She was raised by dogmatic atheists who taught her to despise dogmatic religious beliefs. Her parents were also extremely unhappy – one of them eventually committed suicide.

Everybody who thinks this is a recipe for growing up to have the kind of midlife crisis that leaves you deeply religious, please raise your hand.

(In case you can't see from where you're sitting: Everyone in the entire world just raised their hands.)

Ehrenreich spends an entire book refusing to make this kind of obvious connection. The adolescent experience this book is supposed to be about is so poorly described that it's hard to sum up here, but basically: she took a trip to the desert. She arrived there after having had very little sleep and very little to eat. She'd also spent her entire adolescence on a ferocious quest to define the meaning of life.

(Ehrenreich seems to think this was an unusual thing for a teenager to do. Ehrenreich has apparently never bothered paying attention to any actual teenagers other than herself.)

When she gets to the desert, exhausted and hungry, she has a startling experience that I'm sure would have resonated profoundly with me if Ehrenreich had bothered to tell me what the heck actually happened. Here's the closest she comes to explaining:

At some point in my predawn walk – not at the top of a hill or the exact moment of sunrise, but in its own good time – the world flamed into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with "the All," as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, and one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it. Whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze.

She couldn't just be a sensitive, intelligent teenager made emotionally vulnerable by hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and a landscape entirely new to her. Those couldn't add up to a sudden terrifying sense of her own insignificance. That would be too simple. Too ordinary.

All her life, she's felt herself to be someone special – an atheist in a country of believers, a skeptic among people who value conformity. Now suddenly she is nothing but a pitiful creature who could die of want and be swallowed up, utterly unnoticed, in these terrifyingly stark surroundings.

That emotional moment couldn't be meaningful in and of itself – a humbling experience that would prompt anyone to consider her life from a new and different angle. No, of course not. Being shaken up in this way must mean – duh! – that there really is something out there, some "Other" that needs to be found and defined.

I'm not objecting to the idea that there may well be "something out there." I'm arguing with the premise that having a gut-wrenching emotional experience while wandering young, hungry, thirsty, and tired in the desert makes someone an expert on how the universe works.

That's how Ehrenreich presents herself: the ultimate expert on the ultimate question. She never says "might be" when she can say "must be." She never says "I think" when she can say "I know." She trash-talks science for not exploring religious and spiritual matters, which makes about as much sense as sneering at Stephen Hawking for not being a concert pianist.

The scientific method is not equipped to grapple with philosophical questions. Why is this a problem? It's simply a statement of fact. Science is good at what it does, and what it does is narrowly defined. My food processor isn't equipped to make my bed for me. It's still a good food processor, and my bed still needs making. Well, okay.

Wild God reminds me of my favorite book of the Bible – an apocalyptic, apocryphal work called The Second Book of Esdras. Esdras is visited by the angel Uriel, and is understandably curious. Specifically, he asks some pretty heavy questions about the nature of God, good, and evil.

Uriel listens patiently enough and then says, sure, he'd be happy to answer Esdras' questions. But – fair's fair – Esdras should answer some questions first, mmkay?

If Esdras can answer three questions about three ordinary earthly matters, Uriel will tell him everything he wants to know about how things work in the rest of the universe. Aw, what the heck – Esdras only has to solve one of the Earthly problems Uriel sets for him.

Esdras thinks this is fair:

I said, "Speak on, my lord."

And he said to me, "Go, weigh for me the weight of fire, or measure for me a measure of wind, or call back for me the day that is past."

I answered and said, "Who of those that have been born can do this, that you ask me concerning these things?"

And he said to me, "If I had asked you, 'How many dwellings are in the heart of the sea, or how many streams are at the source of the deep, or how many streams are above the firmament, or which are the exits of hell, or which are the entrances of paradise?' perhaps you would have said to me, 'I never went down into the deep, nor as yet into hell, neither did I ever ascend into heaven.' But now I have asked you only about fire and wind and the day, things through which you have passed and without which you cannot exist, and you have given me no answer about them!"

And he said to me, "You cannot understand the things with which you have grown up; how then can your mind comprehend the way of the Most High?"

I love this passage so much I want to marry it, but that's not the point. The point is: Somebody, please, read this to Barbara Ehrenreich. And then ask her how exactly she has the nerve to admit that neither she nor anyone else knows everything about the human brain – a thing without which we cannot exist – yet she thinks we should skip past figuring out everything in this world and go right to an Unknowable she insists must be out there.

Because, you know, there's no way she could just be feeling something. If she has a strong sense that there's some Other out there, it must be true. Human brains never give us weird signals. Our sensations and emotions are always totally reliable. Ask any paranoid schizophrenic.

Read this book if you enjoy arrogant self-importance with a side of angst-ridden teenage poetry. (Of course Ehrenreich quotes her youthful scribblings. And of course the poems and deep thoughts she shares are totally awesome, provided that means something completely different from what the dictionary says.)

[Stephanie *Eff your feelings* · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure if this type of book could really have spoilers, but I am going to say a great deal about what's in this book. If you don't want to see it...then read the book and come back and read my review.

Barbara Ehrenreich was born and raised atheist in a fairly dysfunctional household. Her parents were intelligent, but also alcoholic and they moved regularly which caused problems with Barbara's education and socialization.

Barbara didn't see other people as intelligent and in possession of a mind, she felt completely apart from her species. She would have the fantasy that one morning she would wake up and find that all the people had just up and disappeared (what self respecting introvert hasn't had that one?). She would work out survival scenarios and all the possible situations that would kill her, and she would work out solutions. Some of them were pretty ingenious. But in the end she decided living alone on the planet would be impossible so thought it best the other people exist, but she didn't have to like it.

One day Barbara started having dissociative episodes, where her mind basically detached from reality....same deal that you'd get from LSD, I suppose. The experiences were both incredible and terrifying, which left her changed, as well as pretty saddened that the episode had ended.

One day, heading home from a ski trip with her brother and her friend, they took a detour. The friend wanted to drive through the desert on the way home, and as it got late they decided to sleep in the car by the side of the road. Barbara woke up earlier than the rest and for some reason wandered away from the car...in the desert. She had the most profound and long lasting dissociative episode which lasted the entire day (there about). Not to worry, she did make it back to the others.

When people have this type of episode they change in a big, and (from what I've read) for the better, way. Eckhart Tolle had one on the night he decided to kill himself....he was deep in despair, then something clicked and he had one of these episodes and he came out the other end of it a completely different person. Even my aunt, who was a wild child, partied all the time...rode motorcycles, had one in the shower (of all places) and immediately became her mother.

Both Eckhart and my aunt attributed their experiences as the work of god. Eckhart in a more general, spiritual sense and my aunt in a completely Catholic sense. I'm sure the majority of people who have gone through this call it god, basically for lack of a better explanation. But Barbara, being atheist, did not immediately label it god. She thought she was going coo-coo-banana-cakes....which she kind of did for a while since the experience was almost too much for her brain to process. Instead, she did a lot of research into what might have caused this to happen on a scientific level, and basically kept her mouth shut about it until now, worried that people would label her as crazy and not take her work seriously.

How did this episode change Barbara? She started seeing other people as people, as having their own minds and feelings. She started to become a part of her species for the first time in her life. She became an activist, a feminist...writing such books as Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.

I thought this book was fascinating and I really enjoyed her perspective.

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was tremendously excited when I heard Barbara Ehrenreich was writing a book about spirituality. After all, this is the author of Nickel and Dimed and Bright-Sided (aka Smile or Die), two classic works of journalistic enquiry. I couldn’t wait to see what this confirmed atheist would make of mystical experiences. However, having wrestled with the book for over five months, often only managing to read a few pages at a time, I find myself disappointed.

What has Ehrenreich written here? She refuses to acknowledge that Living with a Wild God is a memoir. “I will never write an autobiography,” she vows in her foreword, and later she insists “this is not the story of me or of that even more imaginative construct, ‘my life.’” To justify such statements, she places extreme limits on the fragment of biography told in these 237 pages. It is only the story of her teenage years, when she was obsessed with the big philosophical questions and wrote navel-gazing journal entries about her quest for the truth of everything, and for herself. Solipsism, coupled with repeat dissociative episodes, set her up for an encounter with the Other.

The culmination of all this was a confusing spiritual experience out in the desert of California. She doesn’t describe this in much detail; her memory has faded, and mystical encounters are by nature unspeakable. But she would occasionally relive that moment of vision, the kind of ecstasy described by medieval mystics: “this onrush. … Nothing could contain it. Everywhere, ‘inside’ and out, the only condition was overflow.”

Despite her resistance to religion, she still could not simply explain her experience away with “incidental physiological factors like exhaustion and hypoglycemia.” At the same time, she mocks the tendency to label anything unexplainable as the work of a deity; “When people run up against something inexplicable, transcendent, and, most of all, ineffable, they often call it ‘God,’ as if that were some sort of explanation.”

Ehrenreich has a very interesting family history. They started out in Butte, Montana, where her father was a copper miner and her mother a cleaner, and also spent time in Massachusetts and California. Her father, a gifted metallurgist who inspired her atheism as well as her interest in chemistry, was an alcoholic who drifted off into Alzheimer’s; her mother committed suicide. They escaped their lower-class origins, but not themselves. Ehrenreich has a lot to say about the family dynamic, including a Freudian analysis. Yet by sidelining it all in favor of one seemingly minor event in her teen years, she seems to render it unimportant. Nor does she say enough about her later activism to align this with memoirs by, say, Studs Terkel and Barack Obama.

The best chapter in the book is the final one, “The Nature of the Other.” Here Ehrenreich comes closest to a sociological study of mystical experiences, in the vein of William James and Evelyn Underhill. Ultimately, that is the book I would have preferred: an up-to-date scholarly discussion of spiritual encounters, with either an introduction or an epilogue explaining her personal interest in the subject. The entire meat of the book might have been summed up in a few sentences (in my own words):

“I was a precocious adolescent, preoccupied with my own identity and with the search for the source and meaning of all things. My solipsism and frequent dissociative episodes culminated in a mystical encounter out in the desert in California. Reading back through my teenage journals now, I can see that this sparked my interest in the nature of the Other, and also paved the way for my growing involvement in human rights activism by kick-starting my compassionate instincts – yet I still cannot explain what happened.”

That pithy summary would be justification enough for embarking on the kind of sociohistorical study Ehrenreich does best. Writing a book that doesn’t fit into any of the genres it touches on (such as theology, history, sociology, psychology and autobiography) could have been a way of making it stand out, but for me the experiment didn’t work.

For a book with ‘God’ in the title, this really has very little to add to the theological conversation. It’s a shame, because sometimes I felt that Ehrenreich would have something very valuable to add to the dialogue between religion and science:

“experience—empirical experience—requires me to keep an open mind. … Even the most austere vacuum is a happening place, bursting with possibility and constantly giving birth to bits of Something, even if they’re only fleeting particles of matter and antimatter. … It is not unscientific to search for what may not be there—from intelligent aliens to Higgs bosons or a vast ‘theory of everything’ underlying all physical phenomena. It is something we may be innately compelled to do.”

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received an Advanced Reader Copy of this book through the Goodreads First Reads program.

I am familiar with Barbara Ehrenreich as a social commentator and have read some of her essays and one or two of her books. I was attracted to the premise of this book: prompted by coming across a journal she kept as a teenager, a lifelong atheist looks back and tries to reconstruct and analyze her adolescent search for “the Truth.”

Ehrenreich grew up in a horribly dysfunctional family in which both parents were alcoholics. Her father was a brilliant but remote man and her mother, crushed by the soul-sucking 1950’s took her frustrations out on her oldest daughter. I was drawn to the teenaged Barbara, lonely and smarter than her peers, who having been raised an atheist is denied the false but numbing solace of religion to help her cope with the abusive family life she must endure. Like we all do when we’re young, she questions the meaning of life but she falls far deeper down the rabbit hole than most of us.

The first half of the book describes her quest to answer the question “What’s it all about?” and she ties herself in knots trying to figure out if she exists, much less anyone or anything else. She also begins to have episodes of dissociation in which reality briefly retreats. Interestingly, she doesn’t seem frightened, but almost embraces these episodes. This culminates, in her senior year of high school, in what would be described as a mystical experience which, because she can’t even describe it to herself, she essentially puts away into the recesses of her mind.

I can remember being that angst-ridden adolescent, wondering what life was all about. I answered the question with religion for a while but somewhere in high school I rejected that institution. I saw that people needed to be good for its own sake and not out of fear of damnation. I never did have any patience though for the kind of philosophical, metaphysical questions that consumed Ehrenreich. That total self-absorption, going round and round with unanswerable questions just never seemed productive to me. This made the first half of the book a bit of a slog at times.

It is interesting that the incredible experience that might seem to be a culmination of her questioning doesn’t give her any added insight. In fact, soon after, she leaves home to attend college and the dissociative events and her endless questioning retreat in the face of actually living her life. She truly joins the human race in the mid-1960’s as a graduate student when she becomes an active antiwar protester which sets the stage for the rest of her life as a social activist.

After bouts of depression in her 50’s, Ehrenreich comes across her adolescent journal and a few years later begins to go through it and try to make sense of the experience she had as a teenager. She comes to the conclusion that there is what she calls the “Other” and this is what she, as well as others down the ages who have had mystical experiences, had glimpsed. She makes it clear that this not the monotheistic God of Christianity/Judaism/Islam.

“I came to think of it as the Presence, what scientists call an “emergent quality,” something greater than the sum of all the parts—the birds and cloudscapes and glittering Milky Way—that begins to feel like a single, breathing Other. There was nothing mystical about this Presence, or so I told myself. It was just a matter of being alert enough to put things together, to catch the drift. And when it succeeded in gathering itself together out of all its bits and pieces…there was a sense of great freedom and uplift, whether on my part or its.”

She goes on to admit she is sure of nothing.

“Do I believe that there exist invisible beings capable of making mental contact with us to produce what humans call mystical experiences? No, I believe nothing. Belief is intellectual surrender; “faith” a state of willed self-delusion… But experience –empirical experience—requires me keep an open mind.”

I can appreciate much of what she is saying. I am a nonbeliever but I’m not comfortable with the label of atheist. I don’t believe in any kind of God who is controlling our lives or the universe. But I don’t have proof one way or the other. Could there be an “Other” such as Ehrenreich describes? Maybe. I’m not convinced by the argument that people who have had mystical experiences must have connected with something though. I think it much more likely that it is a result of biochemical and electrical occurrences in our brains. Ehrenreich lost me a bit at the end with her speculations about the Other but I will agree that we can’t fully explain these kinds of experiences. No doubt about it, it’s a fascinating topic.

While the first half wore me down, I appreciated that reading this book caused me to spend some time revisiting my own questioning, adolescent self and reflect on my own spiritual journey. It was feeling like a 3 star book but it has kept me thinking so I'm giving it 4 stars. This is certainly a worthwhile read and one that’s bound to spark a lot of discussion.

[Jaylia3 · Rating 5 out of 5]

What does a 70-something journalist, advocate for social justice, and life-long atheist trained in science make of the long series of spiritual-feeling dissociative experiences she’s had off and on since she was a teenager? Barbara Ehrenreich, author Nickel and Dimed, turns her unflinching, unsentimental powers of investigation on herself this time and the result is largely fascinating.

She originally expected to write a history of religion, but at the advice of her agent that plan morphed. Ehrenreich often appears in her writing, taking menial jobs to report on them in Nickel and Dimed, and using her experiences as a cancer patient in the magazine article “Welcome to Cancerland,” but this is a more personal life history. Ehrenreich writes about being raised without much affection by alcoholic parents in a working class family whose atheism goes back several generations, giving her no context for the maybe mystical, world on fire states she would slip into. As a young child she became consumed with the question “Why do we die and what is the purpose of life?” and even before her scientific training she tried to find answers in the most systematic ways she could design--a quest she has continued though it has taken various forms. By her own account she was self-centered, almost not believing in the existence of conscious feeling beings outside herself, until a lab partner mentioned he might be drafted into the Vietnam War, a revelation that began her career as an activist.

I have long been impressed by Ehrenreich’s commitment to causes and powers of reasoning so the chance to look inside her life was irresistible.There were a few parts of the book I skimmed, the details of her lab experiments for instance, but even those sections usually led to the consideration of interesting ideas. Like all of Ehrenreich’s books Living With a Wild God is unshrinking, eye-opening, and thought-provoking, with passages of smart, sharp humor.

[David Rubenstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

While looking through the remains of her hurricane-flooded house in the Florida keys, Barbara Ehrenreich discovered a journal that she wrote as a teenager. Her journal forms the foundation of this book. Growing up, she remembers her family was often dysfunctional. Her mother was rather mean-hearted, and her father was a genius, but also an alcoholic. It is obvious that Ehrenreich is also a genius, and as a child she was precocious. Growing up, she often engaged in solipsism--the idea that her mind was the only one that actually exists. Ehrenreich's parents were both atheists, and she grew up as an atheist. She tried to answer the question, what is the meaning of life.

Ehrenreich occasionally had dissociative experiences, without the influence of drugs. She describes a road trip to a ski area with her younger brother and an acquaintance. On the way home, she wanders from the car in the desert. She returns later in the day, with a very sunburned face and no memory of her experience.

Ehrenreich seemed to be a lonely child, and had only a single friend. In college she went into chemistry, and earned a PhD in physics. Yet she never worked in science, and instead became a well-known journalist and author.

The book is very philosophical, and sometimes it seems to be her stream of consciousness speaking. As other reviewers have mentioned, it feels like I am inside Ehrenreich's brain, as her writing describes her life with super-honesty. Perhaps I didn't give the book the attention it deservers; while the book is not boring, it did not "grab" me like some other reviewers. Her book is a spiritual journey with no answers.

[Dani · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was quite disappointed by this. It was rather self-indulgent and aggrandazing and, well, it totally lacked the self-reflection I would expect from an intelligent woman in the second half of her life.

Especially there was almost no reference to the wealth of knowledge to be found in modern neuroscience and general psychology regarding the brain basis of religious beliefs and transcendental experiences - and that seemed incongruous for a proclaimed scientist.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Call this book review "The deep loneliness of Barbara Ehrenreich" or maybe "The Tragedy of Barbara Ehrenreich."

Also now call it dropped from two stars to one. See end of review for why.

I wrestled with exactly how to rate this book. Her alleged metaphysical experience as a teen, and her return to it at late-midlife crisis time? That part's a 1-star, and I knew that when I had read an excerpt online. She even admits that, as William James notes, the physical "symptoms" she had of her mystical experience are not uncommon. Yet, she wants to mystify them, rather than noting that hypoglycemia, sleep deprivation of a moderate sort and stress could easily have caused her own version of a common experience.

That's especially true in light of her history of depersonalization and disassociation. There's fairly solid evidence that some people are by nature more susceptible to such things. Or -- by childhood.

And here we get to the reason I'll give the book a second star, and start talking about the title.

About 4/5 the way in, she says, (semi-exact quote), "If this were a biography, this is where it would begin."

But, the book IS a biography of sorts, a sad and tragic one. The fact that she doesn't seem to see it that way ties in with the very psychological tragedy that she seems to want to avoid discussing further, even in her 70s.

Here's the basics on her childhood:
1. Two alcoholic parents, with an emotionally manipulative father and an emotionally unavailable mother.
2. A physically abusive mother. (Yes, Barbara, that's what "slapping in the face" is, especially when done with some regularity.)
3. Frequent moves. (She notes that a stay of 18 months in Lowell, Mass., was longer than usual.)
4. Marital trauma that eventually led to divorce not too long after Barbara's "experience," both remarrying, dad divorcing a second time and mother near that point before her suicide.
5. Some history of mental health problems on her mom's side of the family.

Well, depersonalization/dissociation is a kind of common "defense mechanism" in such cases. And, perhaps she had some inherited susceptibility, too.

The "solipsism" she later on discovers in her teenage and college self is another defense mechanism. So, too, in all likelihood, are some of the ritual behaviors of her pre-teen life she describes but fleetingly. So, too, as an adult, is writing about your own life in a semi-detached, semi-third-person style.

And yet, she can be "hard" toward others who have as many, or more, depersonalization experiences than her, even referring mockingly to a self-help website for depersonalization.

Per one other two-star reviewer, it's too bad that counseling wasn't as great then as it is today. But, it is available today. Even with anti-depressants for her depression, she probably could use help facing her childhood still further. Her attempt to cling to her childhood experience as pointing to the existence of a mystical Other also seems, tragically, to be in part a defense mechanism.

I suspect her childhood was worse than she's told us, too.

The mystical attachments aside, the book isn't trash. But, it probably should not have been written. And, I think the disjointedness and sometimes poor style reflect the issues I mention above. Or, as part of professional help and other things, maybe it should have been written three years from now as an actual biography.

It's very hard to believe that the author of Bright-Sided could have written this. Unless, again, this is seen as cri de coeur first, paean to mysticism a distant second.

[Editorial addition, Sept. 2, 2022, on learning of her death yesterday: And, in hindsight, it's not just that she pulled punches as an autobiography or memoir. Assuming she was a child abuse victim, she could have done more for other victims and survivors by speaking out in detail. But, didn't.]

Update, Sept. 2, 2022. Via Twitter, I just got done reading a Harper's interview with her that I had never before noticed.

She owns up to lifelong atheism, but yet takes her high school experience as not just "mystical," but, if you will, a "theophany." I quote:

After a night spent sleeping in a car, she went for a morning walk in the woods and felt the presence of another being — she later said she “saw God” — then spent the next several decades ignoring the experience and hoping it wouldn’t recur.

Somehow, I missed in my review that she actually said she had "seen God." I might have 1-starred the book instead (while still being sympathetic to her as a child abuse victim).

Harper's interviewer Ryann Lieberthal then asks her:

What would you attribute those experiences to now? If you saw something there in Lone Pine, what was that thing?

And, Ehrenreich simply refuses to give a straight-up answer.

The interview about the rest of her work, beyond and based on the previous books she had written? Very good stuff. This? Even though the rest of the part of the interview that talks about "Wild God" only has her talking about consciousness of other animals, that's bad enough. A PhD scientist (she was) strawmanning biologists as claiming that about all of them don't talk about, or even reject, consciousness in other animals.

And, behind that, since she didn't answer Lieberthal straight up? I sense a hint at the same New Ageyness that she excoriated elsewhere.

But wait! It gets WORSE.

Searching online for "Barbara Ehrenreich" + "mysticism" leads me to find out that she even had an interview with RELIGION NEWS SERVICE about this, and there claims MULTIPLE mystical experiences.

And thus, here at Goodreads, I did NOT put it on my religious study/theology shelf, and certainly not on my philosophy one. It's on the biography shelf -- and the psychology one. (And now, after these updates, also on the BS/pablum shelf.

[Michelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

Premise: This book is a memoir about Barbara Ehrenreich, a athiest and scientist who is striving to answer some very difficult life questions that all of us have. The content in this book is often quite hard to get through if you are not into (or knowledgeable) about science. Barbara talks a lot about very complex scientific things. If you love chemistry though, you will probably have fun reading it. Me personally, I'm not a scientist so I often found myself getting bored and very confused. I did manage to finish this book in one day though.

Writing: I'm going to take it easy on judging the writing here because as far as I know I am one of the first people to read this book, and I believe it isn't even published yet. The book may undergo some more editing before it hits the shelves. That being said, there were a number of typos including accidentally repeated words or sentences with words not in the right order. This was distracting at times. Other then that....tons of big scientific words abound. The tone is very philosophical.

Humor: There is no humor in this book.

Journey: I finished this book in one day, however because of the condescending tone towards people of faith (and often people in general), also the countless banter of scientific experiments and complicated words I found this book almost painful to read. While I was intrigued by Barbara's very unique mind set, and the way she views things is very different compared to myself (which fascinates me) I didn't really learn anything or take away anything from her story. A word of caution, if you are religious I only recommend you read this book if you have a thick skin.

As a first reader, I really wish I could give a better review. I wanted to enjoy this book.

[Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Goodreads and Twelve Books for the review copy.

Nothing in me wants to review this book because I don't want to get into a discussion about its contents. The truth is, there's stuff in here to upset atheists and believers alike, and I just don't want to get in that discussion on Goodreads. Perhaps I'll change my mind later, but I doubt it.

That said, this is extremely well-written by one of the smartest minds I've encountered in a book. Ehrenreich is beyond intelligent. Her mind may leave you in the dust. If you're interested in science, mysticism, physics, chemistry, biology, and life in general, I recommend.

Just so everyone knows, this is a book about when a young Ehrenreich (an atheist, even now) tried to find the truth of why we exist. She went on a short skiing trip and then on the journey home had an "encounter" with an "other." She described it, “There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me, and I poured out into it.” Here's a review by Dwight Gardner in the NYTimes that does a much better job of dissecting and critiquing this near explosion of ideas: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/...


If this sounds interesting at all, read it. I, for one, found it enlightening, profound, maddening at times, and bolstering (I won't say what I mean by that).

[Jenny (Reading Envy)]

65 pages in and I'm just not connecting with it. I think it has to do more with how the book is written than the subject matter itself. Or the fact that my library ended up with the large-print version and the words just scream at me from the page. I can't hold it far enough away to feel comfortable, and for some reason I can't focus. I might try it again someday, but I suspect I don't care enough about her philosophical perspective. I wanted more of the journal and her spiritual experiences and how she made sense of them, and most of the book wasn't about that as promised.

[Lisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love Barbara Ehrenreich, and was lucky enough to have her as a professor in journalism school. This book, unfortunately, wasn't what I expected. I learned more about her upbringing but the "mystical experience" she takes forever to lead up to was disappointing in its scope. Between that and all the philosophizing, I just skimmed most of the book. Sorry, Barbara!

[Jay Green · Rating 3 out of 5]

As someone who experienced exactly the same “dissociative” episodes as those described by Barbara Ehrenreich, albeit two decades later, in the 1970s, and as an 11-year-old boy, I found the first part of this book compelling reading. Unfortunately for her, Ehrenreich lacked the vocabulary and peer community to make adequate sense of her experiences, being raised at a time of behaviorist psychology, reductionist scientism, and vulgar psychiatry. The schizophrenic diagnosis she was stuck with would not be tolerated today and probably intimidated her into not pursuing her investigations further; she was too scared to discuss her experiences for fear of being labelled mentally ill, a stigma that in those days came with the possibility of the chemical cosh, ECT, and social ostracism. My trajectory was different, thanks purely to my later birth date, to have the option of progressing past what Ehrenreich correctly regards as Sartre’s poor description of “dissociative” episodes in La Nausée to more detailed phenomenological studies (The Imaginary, the Psychology of the Imagination, and Being and Nothingness had all been translated into English by then), and to philosophy in general. The "mystical" experiences we shared are better described not as dissociation but as examples of “jamais vu,” the other side of the coin to “déjà vu,” a feeling usually induced by momentary disorientation and leading to a sense of sudden waking into an alien world, a world not “unreal,” as the term “dissociation” implies, but one that is oppressively, excessively real, an imposition on a consciousness that finds this newly minted world not so much unrecognizable as contingent, absurd, and without justifiable foundation. It is overpoweringly demanding while at the same time refusing to specify its demands. This, I think, is why Franz Kafka is often categorized as an existentialist writer; the “authorities” in his books impose intolerable demands on its protagonists without a single clue as to what those demands might be. For an 11-year-old boy in a packed school assembly with no idea which way to turn, such episodes were terrifying and usually led to panic attacks. For an equally terrified Ehrenreich, until a cancer diagnosis led her to recover her adolescent diaries, she talked to only one person about her episodes (and then only once and briefly), harboring the dread that she might be mentally ill.

I’m somewhat saddened that Ehrenreich, who died only recently, did not get the chance to explore her mystical experiences in more depth and detail. Over time, I have made the jamais vu experience my … well, not friend, since the uncanniness is unsettling every time, but perhaps a tolerable research subject that I can induce and prevail upon to explore with the kind of Husserlian “bracketing” that allows phenomenological investigation. Ehrenreich's tentative conclusion to her speculations is a form of animism arising from her encounters with an all-too-real world. It is only really in recent years that cutting-edge neuro- and cognitive scientists have even begun to take phenomenology seriously (Evan Thompson's Mind in Life springs to mind) and recognized the irreducibility of the subjective experience without lapsing into solipsism or Dualism. Had Ehrenreich lived a little longer or been born a little later, she might have been able to achieve a more satisfying and satisfactory resolution to her belated quest to make sense of it all.

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book I should have connected with. Barbara Ehrenreich and I both attended the same small college (Reed) in the 1960's and later connected with nature in an almost religious way in spite of or maybe because we are atheists.

For me the book got better in the last 1/3, but it was hard to get there. If this had not been a goodreads win that I felt obligated to review, I would have given up early on. Ms. Ehrenreich is obviously one smart cookie if she earned a degree in chemical physics from Reed. The physics department was not welcoming for women when I attended a few years later. I'm sure they cut her no slack. Over and over she throws up her father as a really smart person she can never equal. But whenever she describes an interaction with him, he comes off as an alcoholic buffoon. I was really irritated with her bouncing between "Look at all the brilliant things I wrote and did when I was young." and "I'm not very smart."

I think most people would connect better with the book if they are not soured by the first two thirds of the book. Just read the end.

If you are looking for a book about relationships with nature and a father by someone who attended Reed College, check out Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone.

[Bill on GR Sabbatical · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America years ago and found it interesting, but didn't know anything else about Barbara Ehrenreich's life and work. I was surprised to learn that she was born in Butte, Montana, a great place from which to launch a lifelong quest to understand the meaning of life and death, which is the subject of this fascinating memoir. She traces her quest from memories of her alcoholic, atheist parents and childhood episodes of dissociation that haunted her, through an education in the sciences that culminated with a Ph.D., and a career as an activist, journalist, and author of over 20 books, concluding that there might be something more than science reveals, but she's not very clear about what it might be. I liked the book, but not everyone will.

[Callie · Rating 5 out of 5]

An old atheist goes soft. I have heard in fact that this is quite common, believers when they near death come to doubt their belief and atheists start to hope they were all wrong.

My first time to read Barbara Ehrenreich and what a mind! Brilliant! Also, original. I practically inhaled this book. I was afraid, nearing the end, that she was going to lose the thread of what she had started, but she did not let me down. Really, I should have known that with such a keen mind, she would bring her argument and her conundrum full circle and work things out properly. When I say properly I don't mean to imply that I necessarily agree with all her conclusions, but I am satisfied that she thought it through and worked on it and came up with a better understanding of the mysterious wonder of being alive than she had to begin with. In fact, I think that is one of my favorite things about her: her passionate curiosity allows her to be open enough to see that science has to be questioned and roughed up at least as much as religion has been in the recent past.


I was going to point out, in fact, that for all her genius when it come to science and reason and logic, she is the equivalent of a Kindergarten kid when it comes to the spiritual quest. I don't say this because I am particularly wise myself, but I just so happen to be reading Autobiography of a Yogi at the moment and HE is a seeker and far more spiritually evolved than most and it's easy to see that if he weren't dead he could have given Ehrenreich some much needed direction. I was going to point that out, but in the end, she alludes to it herself: "This is the challenge that comes hurtling out at me from across the decades. . . 'What did you learn about all of this?' Well I have to admit to my child-self: not enough, not anywhere near enough. To please you I would have had to devote my life to neuroscience and philosophy, possibly also ashrams and spiritual discipline. I would have studied cosmology and math. I would have passed many hours with fellow seekers, perhaps in scenically magnificent settings, debating, sharing, comparing."

But in all she did take quite a mind-journey and in this book she does an exquisite job of describing that odyssey. It is gorgeous,complicated, breathtaking, brainy, beautiful. Wild.

And now some more quotes from the book:

"The problem with families is . . .that you're always getting confused with someone else and end up taking the blame for them."

"On the whole despite family tensions, social isolation, the ongoing horror of puberty, and intermittent philosophical despair, I was not unhappy. . ."

"In the Freudian framework, the God of monotheism is a projection based on the child's perception of reliably nurturing and powerful parents. I had no such template to build on"

". . the great unforgivable crime of the monotheistic religions has been to encourage the conflation of authority and benevolence, of hierarchy and justice. When the pious bow down before the powerful or, in our own time, the megachurches celebrate wealth and its owners the 'good' and perfect God is just doing his job of legitimizing human elites."

She quotes Harold Bloom: "We have vastly underrated the cosmos that gave us birth. We have understated her achievements, her capacities and her creativity. We've set aside will, purpose and persistence in a magic enclosure and have claimed that...they do not belong to nature, they belong solely to us human beings"

[Megan Baxter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is definitely not for what I usually sit down to read Barbara Ehrenreich. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it did take me a little while to adapt to what was not a story both personal and researched, relating her experiences to wider domains of thought and study. There's certainly work out there on mystical experiences and the like, but she is not drawing it in and weaving it with her story. This is as close to a straight-up memoir as I've ever seen from her.

Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently read this article that speculates as to how our world might end. In addition to the familiar threats of nuclear war and a rise of the machines was the idea, becoming ever more popular, that our reality is simply a computer simulation being run on an alien processor; that "God" could become bored with us at any time and end humanity with the flick of a power switch (Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom calculates the likelihood of this scenario at greater than 50%). Dovetailing nicely into this concept is Barbara Ehrenreich's memoir, Living with a Wild God, in which the author describes glimpses she has had of the matrix throughout her life.

Although Ehrenreich states a couple of times that this is not an autobiography as she has no intention of writing one, that's exactly what it is. After rediscovering her teenage journals -- which she kept specifically to investigate the meaning of life -- Ehrenreich was struck by a challenge from the person she was in 1958: "What have you learned since you wrote this?" And although Ehrenreich abandoned her enquiry as she left her teen years, as a 70-something-year-old investigative journalist suffering from Depression and Breast Cancer, she decided to take up the challenge again and try to make sense of the curious experiences of her youth.

Ehrenreich describes a terrible childhood with two alcoholic parents -- her father distant and her mother abusive -- who moved the family around often, attempting to claw their way up the social ladder from a white trash existence in Butte, Montana (the author's words) to the middle-class respectability of Southern California. Ehrenreich was raised as an atheist but allowed to explore the faiths and traditions of her friends, which only confirmed to her the non-existence of a deity. She read widely in science and philosophy and independently developed a solipsistic belief system (in which, as she couldn't prove the reality of others, Ehrenreich could assume that only she herself existed -- an adolescent fantasy to which I also subscribed). Throughout these years, however, every now and then Ehrenreich would lose her focus on reality and see objects as they "really" were. The pinnacle of these experiences took place on a ski trip when, physically exhausted and hungry (a state the author compares to the one induced by Natives who went on vision quests), Ehrenreich went for a walk:

In the next few minutes, on that empty street, I found whatever I had been looking for. Here we leave the jurisdiction of language, where nothing is left but the vague gurgles of surrender expressed in words such as "ineffable" and "transcendent". For most of the intervening years, my general thought has been: if there are no words for it, then don't say anything about it. Otherwise you risk slopping into "spirituality", which is, in addition to being a crime against reason, of no more interest to other people than your dreams.

But there is one image, handed down over the centuries, that seems to apply, and that is the image of fire, as in the "burning bush". At some point in my pre-dawn walk -- not at the top of a hill or the exact moment of sunrise, but in its own good time -- the world flamed into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with "the all", as promised by the eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, and one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it. Whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze…

"Ecstasy" would be the word for this, but only if you are willing to acknowledge that ecstasy does not occupy the same spectrum as happiness or euphoria, that it participates in the anguish of loss and can resemble an outbreak of violence.

This is the central experience that Ehrenreich hints at throughout the early part of this book, and although I understand that it was "indescribable", three short paragraphs make for a slightly disappointing climax. The author is careful to never attribute her experiences to a "God encounter" but she did understand that it was outside the norm -- enough to have been scared that it was a sign of Schizophrenia or Dissociative Disorder. Her visions stopped when she went to university and studied the sciences (although if one wanted to invoke Jungian Synchronicity, it seems beyond coincidence that Ehrenreich was assigned to study silicon diodes that appeared to exhibit life-like behaviours -- a fact that would later be a base for Chaos Theory), and after a conversation with a fellow student who was afraid of being drafted in to the Vietnam War, Ehrenreich decided to finally abandon solipsism and embrace humanity as her species. She became an antiwar activist, a feminist, and an investigator into the dark underbelly of the American Dream.

And then she hit her seventies and was confronted by the challenge from her teenage self -- "What have you learned since you wrote this?" -- and Ehrenreich finally decided to investigate the nature of her visions. She shares her research into the experiences of others (everyone from St. Paul's Damascene conversion to author Philip K. Dick's commitment to a mental hospital after "breaking through the veil") and comes to this conclusion:

Science fiction, like religious mythology, can only be a stimulant to the imagination, but it is worth considering the suggestion it offers, which is the possibility of a being (or beings) that in some sense 'feeds' off of human consciousness, a being no more visible to us than microbes were to Aristotle, that roams the universe seeking minds open enough for it to enter or otherwise contact. We are not talking about God, that great mash-up of human yearnings and projections, or about some eternal 'mystery' before which we can only bow down in awe.

It's important to remember that Ehrenreich is not only an atheist but earned a PhD in Cellular Immunology -- she's a scientist at heart and searched for fact-based explanations for her experiences. That she couldn't find that explanation in the natural world doesn't mean that she developed a belief in the supernatural, only that the views of nature she observed require further investigation (and she also dismisses psychotropic visions as something else entirely). If these proposed beings that feed off of human experiences are her best guess, Ehrenreich hedges even about them:

Do I believe that there exist invisible beings capable of making mental contact with us to produce what humans call mystical experiences? No, I believe nothing. Belief is intellectual surrender; “faith” a state of willed self-delusion… But experience -- empirical experience -- requires me to keep an open mind.

I was fascinated by Living with a Wild God, but then again, Ehrenreich wrote here about many topics that have long fascinated me. If the alien life form at the switch doesn't lose interest in us too soon, I will be happy to read some of her other (less esoteric) works.

[Anni · Rating 5 out of 5]

"WHAT IS ACTUALLY GOING ON HERE”

As the above quote suggests, this book is about a metaphysical quest for the elusive ‘truth’ about the universe and everything, written by a scientist who came to dismiss the explanations offered by religion, poetry or philosophy.

Barbara Ehrenreich is well known as a non-conformist writer and thinker wth a deep sense of social justice. Much of her religious scepticism and later political activism can be attributed to growing up with parents who were staunch atheists in a largely blue collar Catholic society – as she says, she became an ‘atheist by family tradition’.

This intimate memoir is triggered by revisiting her teenage diaries, forming a commentary on her precocious existential angst about “the truth” and the futility of life, together with a background history of dysfunctional alcoholic parents, in one unstable environment after another. Barbara's coping mechanism was to detach herself emotionally and employ ‘the protective armour of solipsism’. I must admit I thoroughly related to her teenage self, which brought back memories of my own pretentious – and what I would describe as typically adolescent - musings. Her long-running elaborate fantasy that she was the only person left alive on earth was one of my favourite daydreams (and surely I can't have been the only youngster to dabble in this self-indulgent reverie, other than Barbara?)

It's probably true to say that this withdrawal and social isolation, aggravated by a tendency to ‘over-think’ could be a contributory factor to the dissociative mental states she sometimes experienced – leading to the central transcendental occurrence at the heart of this narrative. Barbara struggles to describe this epiphany she experienced in non-spiritual terms but cannot find the words. However, she later comes to realise that altered states of consciousness can be caused by physiological states, such as epileptic seizures, schizophrenia or other dissociative disorders. In this particular case, sleep deprivation and hunger surely must have played a part:

“What happened to me when I was 17 represents a widespread, if not exactly respectable category of human experience” she admits to herself later and begins to accept that many other people might also have had the same reactions.

The last chapter is a review of historical, scientific and religious explanations for mystical experiences. My own explanation, for what it's worth (and I am open to challenge on this) is that the experience of transcendental ‘revelations’ for which there is no language, occurs as a temporary psychic regression to a baby's ineffably overwhelming perception of the world before language is acquired.
Barbara concludes with these words: “I believe nothing. Belief is intellectual surrender; ’faith’ a state of willed self-delusion”. Yet while rejecting the ‘unapproachable God of monotheism', she advises herself and others to keep an open mind - and carry on seeking the answers to ‘why”.

[Terri · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a challenging book. Enrenreich carries the reader along on her journey as she tries to reconcile a mystical experience in her adolescence with her lack of faith. I respect, immensely, her decision to write a weird book about a deeply personal experience that she likely knew would not satisfy anyone looking for the popular memoir story-arc. At the same time, I found myself impatient with her assumption that her experience was either inexplicable or unusual. She chose, based on her own upbringing, not to discuss her mystical experience with religious people, and I think she would have found many, many people had already developed a language for this topic. I also found her leap of "logic" at the end entirely without base. I re-read the last chapter and remain convinced that she doesn't draw a meaningful conclusion. Her opinion, that mystical experience could mean that there are Others for whom we can search scientifically is not without merit, but she doesn't ever adequately explain why that is more compelling than human pattern recognition or even mental illness. In the end, the book was interesting, but not satisfying. Her struggle with this topic made itself felt in her inability to craft a fully formed thesis.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received this via a Goodreads giveaway - I am so glad I won this title!
I've loved reading Barbara Ehrenreich ever since coming across "Nickel & Dimed" when I worked in a bookstore.
This book, "Living with a Wild God", is a beautifully written memoir detailing her quest for meaning throughout her life. Prompted by finding journals she'd written as an adolescent, Barbara explores where her spiritual journey took her and where she is now. Coming from someone who was trained as a scientist, is a journalist and author of great renown, as well as a passionate social justice advocate, this book is thought provoking and inspiring.
Whether you believe in a god, a higher power, or not, I strongly urge you to read this book. You won't be disappointed and you will be challenged to think at least a little bit deeper.

[Fred Forbes · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read a couple of other books by Barbara so I know she can be an informative and entertaining writer. The blurbs for this book read something like "Adolescent girl has mystical experience; in adulthood she examines possible explanations and the nature of God (if any)." Well, since most intelligent people engage in similar quests I was looking forward to hers. What I got was an autobiography. It took well over 1/3 of the book to get to the mystical experience, and frankly, it did not strike me as that big a deal. The rest of the book meandered on about her life in grad school and her family life with an occasional bit of the promised topic. The book is short enough as it is but take out the filling and what would result is what it should have been - a nice magazine article.

[CanadianReader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 3.5

[Larry Bassett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes when the subtitle is significant, you have to include the entire title. That is the case with this book: Living with a Wild God: A Nonbelievers Search for the Truth about Everything. It is a mouthful and takes up a few brain cells as well. It includes some smiles, as you would expect from Barbara Ehrenreich, as well as some deep thoughts.

I spent my teenage years reading Scientific American. I was eleven when the Sputnik was launched in October 1957. Barbara Ehrenreich’s father was a scientist, a metallurgist I think, who started out as a copper miner in Butte, Montana. This book leans heavily on her scientific grounding in her growing up and college years. She writes that she went to bed and woke up thinking about chemistry. Barbara was born in 1941 and I was born five years after her so we are agemates. We grew up in the 1950s.

This is really not a “review” but a reflection with a series of overdone Tweets masquerading as Status Updates attached. You have to read the updates to get the point. My goal is to share just enough of the book with you to make you think you might enjoy reading it yourself. I enjoyed reading it. The author is one of my favorites. She writes with a lilt and a bite. You know that religion is not one of my topics so you will not be surprised to hear that the word “nonbelievers” in the title was one of the attractions for me.

The final two chapters where Ehrenreich got down to saying what she actually thought was going on were the least interesting to me. The whole business of The Other bore little fruit for my way of thinking. Interesting but not really convincing. I actually enjoyed the rest of the book and liked the idea that some of her youthful experiences were neuron incidents and best explained with mental health diagrams. Part of this is because I am used to thinking of myself as somewhat uniquely “crazy” and that being a part of my personality. People sometimes have odd experiences and Barbara Ehrenreich is clearly a “people”!

I thought most of the book was a four star effort but she lost me and one star at the end. I will be recommending this three star book to several people. Ehrenreich is an enjoyable writer for me. I like her writing skills, her way with words. But mystical experiences are not my thing. I think it is fine that some people have them but they do not turn me on or make me think the world is amazing for them.

But I did find a whole slew of Status Updates that I thought interesting and worthwhile. Maybe you will find them interesting as well. I did think it was an interesting book to start off the New Year! It is a relatively short book so the amount of time you will want to devote to it will depend on how much it makes you think. It was a thoughtful book for me but more from the point of view of how the author experienced her life.

[Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a Barbara Ehrenreich fan so I ripped through this the second I could get it. It's a strange and challenging book-- by turns heartbreaking (her childhood and parents- yikes) and inspiring. It is heavy going intellectually at moments, but it is also a great story. It's a searing story of a brilliant, lonely young women coming of age in a truly dysfunctional family, and managing to grow into an amazing woman nonetheless.

It's a complicated book-- not an "easy" read. She really pushes you to think. But even those not interested on the intellectual quest at the heart of the book will probably like the straight memoir parts. If you like asking the big questions- what's it all about, why are we here? - this will also scratch that itch!

[Annette · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author clearly wanted to write, in rambling fashion, about herself. Not a whole lot about God in the mix.

[Melissa Price · Rating 4 out of 5]

by Barbara Ehrenreich

It's not often that I don't have a rating idea of my feelings on a book before I'm even finished, however it's even more rare for me to not have a rating decided by the time I've finished. I always have a rating ready to go and the review is the one that's more difficult sometimes, but this is a very high interest and deep topic. I'm in a huge battle about this topic in my life at the moment so I'm leaving the rating out until I reflect more.

I can, without question, say that this book 'is' the book that has awakened in me a 'huge' love for memoirs and 'never' in my entire life figured I'd say that, but while on one hand I feel I'm intruding into somebody's personal space, the other side of me realizes that if the author didn't want their message heard than they wouldn't write it for the world to see. I quite frankly admire that, as I also have had a book in the works fictionalized but real (mostly in the brain screaming to get onto paper), for a very long time and a lifetime of experiences which I hope to change and help in some form so I do admire that people allow us inside so we can see and learn new perspectives. THAT I will always believe in......living life with my freedom for an open mind for learning and experiencing all options that life has to offer, just as this author has done.

Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Goodreads First Reads program for the opportunity to read this memoir and for showing me a new love for the genre of books. I'll have a rating and review up asap.....

[Daryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Goodreads First Reads giveaway. I thought this book, primarily due to the subtitle, sounded interesting. The first chapter or two held some promise. Then I got increasingly frustrated with it. A couple of moments toward the end seemed to redeem it somewhat, but in the end, I'm left with a big feeling of blah. Be forewarned there might be spoilers ahead; it's impossible to review this book without discussing them.

Ehrenreich was raised as an atheist, rather than coming to it later, as many of us do. An interesting perspective, perhaps. Early on in the book, she makes references to an event in her youth when she encountered "something" that gave her pause and which she never dealt with in her own mind. When the reader finally gets to that point -- over 100 pages in -- it's a huge disappointment. The parts of this book which serve as basically a memoir are interesting and well-written. Her description of the "event" is vague and completely unsatisfying. She speaks repeatedly of her dissociation (perhaps as a mental illness) and being in a fugue state when she thinks something happens to her, but refuses to acknowledge that her mental state no doubt led her to feelings of contact with "Otherness." It's hard to imagine that this moment in time -- especially given her poor description of it (though she admits it probably can't be described -- the mark of poor writing) -- had such a profound impact on her. By the end of the book, she reaffirms her atheism (particularly in terms of monotheism), but talks of animism and "mystic experiences" as everyday occurrences. Sorry, Barbara, it's all in your head.