Bait and switch! Complete ripoff! There’s not a single secret to superhuman strength to be found in this book!!1!

What you get instead is... enlightenment. Or at least one person’s life journey thereto, and, when you think about it, aren’t they the same thing?

This was such an unexpected delight. Engaging and insightful from the beginning, poignant, self-aware. Tender, even. I get the sense that Bechdel wrote this from a place of love, including for her own self—not something she could’ve done just a few years ago (IMO). (I also get a small sense that mushrooms may have played a part in this growth, apart from the one in her twenties, but what do I know? More power to her if she accomplished it through her own and her loved ones’ efforts).

On the surface, the memoir parts are unremarkable—it’s her tone that fascinated me: compassion the whole way through. So much compassion, for her family and lovers and herself. Recognition of, and wry amusement at, her neophilic experience-seeking tendencies. Acknowledgment of her obsessions, but this time with kindness. Explorations of her own privilege. Humor, but the loving kind. (In a therapy couch: “Lemme get this straight. Perfection and worthlessness aren’t the only options?”) (Yes, there are therapy couches herein, but much fewer than in her previous book, and much less neurotic, and more appropriate). Reflections on death and our opportunities to live, really live. Much Buddhism, nonduality, exploration.

Bechdel is one of the lucky ones. Not because of her successes or MacArthur fellowship: because she has made it into Awareness territory. Which isn’t to say she lives in a state of blissful Om (although, maybe?); simply that she gives every indication of living a more deliberate life; and hot damn, it really thrills me to see that in a person. It gives me so much hope.