Educated as a scientist, Ehrenreich is a journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice. In Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything, 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 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 brings 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 profound re­flection on science, religion, and the human con­dition.

In conversation with  Judith Shulevitz, a senior editor of The New Republic. Book signing to follow.