THE EVOLUTION OF FIRE

A luminous collection of essays on the making of a self.

It is a generally acknowledged truth that our moments of crisis are often what come to define us. Or as essayist Pelster might put it, the moments where our lives are set on fire make us who we are. For her, the fire is literal: A first home burns down in a flash of flame. It’s also metaphorical: Her father is charismatic and destructive, her first marriage implodes, and Pelster herself emerges from the ashes as a first-time mother clutching a dream of writing a book. She writes, “Memoir is not the story of self, but the story of self connected to other selves; memoir is a way of seeing.” In agreement with this sentiment, the essays in this collection chart sightlines for her own story of self, building something akin to a memoir through a series of vivid scenes. She traverses childhood vignettes, informational and personal braided essays, and pens her meditations on crises in prose that manages to be both spacious and striking. The generosity of her attention is remarkable. Through Pelster’s eyes, nothing is too small to be unworthy, not even ants: “The easiest truth in the world to understand, and maybe the easiest one to forget, is that nothing comes from nothing.” Her power of description and enthusiasm for the world are infectious, and the reader is pulled along as if in a spell. Through it all, a buoyant curiosity remains. “We yearned for the fire and ran from the fire like any other animal with a desire for life,” she writes of evolution, and the same could be said for her own journey. These essays might be about crises, but transformation is the power that burns from them, lighting the book from within.

Evocative prose meets a mind tuned to the adaptability of the world.