Anyone who read Sarah Wilson’s First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, her remarkable 2018 memoir about shifting our approach to anxiety and mental illness, will have high expectations for this new book. Her goal, she writes, was to find a way to talk about the feeling that “Something is not right. We’re not living life right. To try to grasp such a pain, to find the beginning and end, is like trying to bite your own teeth.” Instead of grasping too hard, then, she bravely explores what feels so wrong in her unforgettably wholehearted way. The common link among our personal, social, and global struggles—climate chaos, environmental destruction, local and global conflict, and our inability to come together to solve any of it—boils down, Wilson finds, to disconnection. The age of social distancing makes that truth more plain than ever before. So, where is healing to be found?
It sounds like an impossibly big task, but Wilson sets out to reconnect us with a series of short chapters, from “become a soul nerd” (unexpectedly, this…
