Barbara Ehrenreich faces the mystical in 'Living With a Wild God'

Barbara Ehrenreich, an atheist and dogged reporter, talks about reckoning with a baffling encounter in 'Living With a Wild God.'

By David. L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic
April 4, 2014, 1:00 p.m.

Barbara Ehrenreich never meant to write a memoir.

"It seems very self-involved," she says by phone from her home in Arlington, Va. "I have anxiety about it." That anxiety is heightened at the moment because her new book, "Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth About Everything" (Twelve: 240 pp., $26), is as personal a piece of writing as she has ever done, built around a journal from her teenage years that traces both a spiritual quest and a youthful mystical experience, each having to do with "an impression of intention" — the sense that there is some underlying shape or meaning to the universe.

&quot W)hat do you do with something like this — an experience so anomalous, so disconnected from the normal life you share with other people," Ehrenreich asks in the foreword to the book, "that you can't even figure out how to talk about it?" Such a conundrum drives "Living With a Wild God," which is part personal history and part spiritual inquiry.

That's a surprising turn for Ehrenreich, who for more than 40 years has been one of our most accomplished and outspoken advocacy journalists and activists. She is perhaps best known for the 2001 bestseller "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America," which traces her journey through the world of low-income workers, but she has written about everything from gender politics to healthcare to the mechanics of joy, and contributed to publications including Mother Jones, the Nation and the Los Angeles Times. Her 1989 book "Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class" was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-barbara-ehrenreich-20140406,0,2464009.story#axzz2y32g3iS4