Your new book, “Living With a Wild God,” is quite a departure from the immersive, investigative reporting work you’re known for. It’s about dissociative experiences that you had in your teens. Can you describe them? When I was 13, I had these episodes where I could just see the world without any words attached to it, without any associations. It was a little bit spooky. A lot of people might have even thought it was pathological. I thought it was interesting.

You’ve published more than 20 books, including “Nickel and Dimed,” but this is your first memoir. Did you have an aversion to the category? Yeah. I thought it was just an exercise in vanity.

Do you think there might be readers who will come to this book with that same kind of skepticism? Well, they may. I brace myself for that. One reader in particular, I was very nervous that he would see this as some kind of petit-bourgeois self-indulgence — he would actually use words like that, but he didn’t. He said: “This is important because it says a lot to a lot of people. You are not alone.”

In the book, you write about one experience in Lone Pine, Calif., that was particularly intense. I didn’t see any creatures or hear any voices, but the whole world came to life, and the difference between myself and everything else dissolved — but not in a sweet, loving, New Agey way. That was a world flamed into life, is how I would put it.

At the time, what did you think was happening to you? I felt like I had been illuminated in some way, but also I felt shattered. I was a kid — I didn’t know what to do with this. I didn’t know how to interpret it. Even today, the word “spirituality” creeps me out.

What prompted this return to childhood memories? In 2001, I was being treated for breast cancer, and I was pretty sure I was going to recover. But I told myself: “O.K., Barbara, you could be running out of time much sooner than you thought. If you’re ever going to do anything with this, you better do it.”

You’ve written and spoken extensively about your atheism. Did you ever feel you were being deceitful because you’d had these experiences with a world beyond the rational? I realized that whatever I experienced was not anything like a deity that I knew of. It certainly was not a good, caring God of Christianity. On the other hand, I knew it was way out of the reach of science, and I did feel uneasy. My younger sister was distressed that I wrote a book with “God” in the title. We are hard-line atheists, and I had to re-establish my credibility with her or I’d get booted out of the family.

How did you earn back your bona fides? I told my sister how much I was annoyed by a friend of hers. She’s very New Agey. Damn that stuff. I can’t be around it. If something has happened that you don’t have words for, keep thinking.

 Source:The New York Times