Barbara Ehrenreich is an unambiguously serious writer. She reliably produces powerfully convincing books and essays about politics, history and social justice, moving people to outrage and action without ever obfuscating her subjects in a cloud of her own emotions.

In Ehrenreichs own words: As a journalist, I search for the truth. But as a moral person, I am also obliged to do something about it. She traffics in facts and brooks no nonsense, and therefore one has not previously found her books shelved cozily near to those with spiritual themes.

But Ehrenreich is a seeker, and clearly powerless to resist a full dive into a subject that captures her, so she now gives us Living With a Wild God: a reluctantly begun but vigorously rendered book she describes as a philosophical memoir and/or metaphysical thriller.

Ehrenreichs best-known work to date has been Nickled and Dimed, in which she described her year spent undercover subsisting on the minimum wage in America. Ehrenreich an accomplished writer of social justice journalism with a Ph.D. in cell biology chose to work as waitress, hotel maid, etc., as a way of revealing the challenges and costs of this work to those who do it by necessity.

Over 20 books into her career, Ehrenreich is a builder of strong cases who does not mince words, and shes reliably not only unsentimental, but often ANTI-sentimental (even when chronicling her own cancer). So, one does not expect her to indulge in much belly-button gazing: shes an activist, and theres work to be done.

Living With a Wild God does not introduce us to Ehrenreichs belly-button, but it does take us deep into her history, her mind, and her experience of her own spirit, soul, essence or whatever one calls it. What DO we call it? What is it anyway? What are we? What is The Other, and where do we stand in relation to it? Ehrenreichs journalistic attentions have turned to the Mount Everest of truths: an oldie, a biggie and likely too challenging for any lesser explorer to surmount.

Living With a Wild God begins with Ehrenreich discovering an old journal while gathering her papers for donation to a university. The journal reconnects her with her childhood self, and reminds her that she was already taking on the big questions as a small girl. She encounters these questions at various points over the course of her life, bringing her eventually to the answers she sees now, from her vantage point on the brink of old age.

Ehrenreich lays out her autobiographical details as plain matters of fact, but theres no avoiding their emotional impact: she clearly did not have a pleasant childhood, and lived largely in alienated isolation, accompanied by an alcoholic father and an intense, troubled mother whose life eventually ended in suicide. Ehrenreich by her own generally reliable description was a ferociously intelligent, curious, emotionally endangered child, whose temperament and circumstances positioned her to seek more, and ultimately find it.

Ehrenreich through her present-day words, and quotes from her adolescent writings describes her young self as having been on a quest that climaxed in the central drama of her spiritual life, at age 17. Throughout her atheist childhood she experienced occasional dissociative episodes that she was capable of describing in detail yet less capable of contextualizing for herself. The ultimate episode came when the teenage Ehrenreich found herself on a strange and vaguely dangerous errand in the cinematically named town of Lone Pine. She describes the transformative experience she had there, but cautions:

Here we leave the jurisdiction of language, where nothing is left but the vague gurgles of surrender expressed in words like ineffable and transcendent. For most of the intervening years my thought has been: If there are no words for it, then dont 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.

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Barbara Ehrenreichs Living With a Wild God will enlighten, inspire, comfort