In her luminous new memoir, Mary Pipher taps into a cultural moment to offer wisdom, hope, and insight into loss and change. Drawing from her expertise as a psychologist specializing in women, trauma, and the effect of culture on our mental health, she looks at her own story in A Life in Light. 

Her plainspoken depictions of her hard childhood and life’s difficulties are dappled with moments of joy and revelation and tragedies and ordinary miseries.  As a child, she was separated from her parents for long periods. Those separations affected her deeply, but in A Life in Light she explores what she’s learned about how to balance despair with joy. Pipher shares with readers every coping skill she has honed during her lifetime. She reminds us that there is a silver thread of resilience that flows through all of life.  In this book, she points us toward that light.