“It’s eleven o’clock in the morning. A beautiful day, sunny, warm, and I don’t know whether I’m going to live or die.” It’s immediately apparent in Sylvia Hart Wright’s first exhilarating chapter that Activist Odyssey: Inside Protest Movements, Some of Which Worked, a memoir, isn’t about standing on the sidelines in history. It’s about being a part of history.

“When people think of activists, they think of people that are out on the streets or writing letters, but the experience is totally different as an insider,” Hart Wright, now in her 80s and living in Eugene, Oregon, says. “I’ve had that sort of life where I’ve been involved….It’s important for people to know when you’re on the ground and really there, it is a different experience entirely.”

Beginning with Hart Wright’s poverty-stricken and often troubled childhood in New York, Activist Odyssey is a frank narrative of a scholar and activist making her way through an unstable world. Whether it was living at Berkeley during the anti-war movements of the early ’60s, being part of the Freedom March, experiencing Panama during a general strike, or shielding a Zapatista envoy with her body to keep them from harm, Hart Wright somehow always seemed to find herself on the front lines. But is that a coincidence?

“Well, it is and it isn’t,” she says. “When we went to Panama, I didn’t expect to be in the middle of a general strike. We knew [it] was dangerous. But being the nutty one, I wanted to see what was happening.” She laughs. “I was running along, trying to observe everything. You look like something out of a movie. But…I wanted to read the signs. I don’t write about that, but that’s what I did. I’ve been reckless in my life. I have put myself in harm’s way, but I’ve always been somewhat careful.”

Though Activist Odyssey isn’t Hart Wright’s only published book, it is her first piece of narrative nonfiction. Eight years in the making, it became her focus after the death of her husband, peace activist Charles Gray, and Hart Wright’s completion of an oral history based on his life’s work. She then turned her eye toward writing about her own life.

Initially, Hart Wright envisioned a straightforward catalog of her activism. But as she delved deeper into her own story, she realized it required a more personal approach. Early drafts of the memoir, she says, came back encouraging, with friends and family mentioning not only her courage, but her candor in the retelling. “I think I am just very open in some ways. I don’t go along with a lot of the taboos. I’m not ashamed to make mistakes.”

That openness runs throughout Activist Odyssey, depicting a life not only less ordinary, but also very certainly lived. And it wasn’t always an easy balance. In what Kirkus Reviews calls “a smart, straight-talking account by an author who courageously followed her beliefs,” Hart Wright details her life through notes, publications, interviews, research (being a librarian comes in handy), and her own personal recollections.

Activist Odyssey blooms under Hart Wright’s unwavering, steady narrative, her politics and activism often interwoven with turbulent personal life events—marriages, relationships, and affairs that shaped the course of her life but also honed the edges of a determined yet lively personality:

I’d learned some hard lessons. I wasn’t June Allyson or Donna Reed and I didn’t want to live like the unadventurous housewives they portrayed. Never again would I sleep with a man I didn’t desire. I’d earn my own money and pay my own keep. I didn’t crave lots of possessions—I’d hardly been pampered as a child. I just longed to be free to go where my spirit led me and make my own life.

Activist Odyssey, it seems, mirrors both the changes in the world and within Hart Wright herself. Because while her childhood had a rocky start and her early relationships and marriages were marked with silence—in some ways, with her compromising her agency in the name of peace—nothing seemed to contain the fierce will and joyous energy that exemplifies Hart Wright’s journey.

During her childhood, she often felt “muted.” The author notes, “I was seen as a timid soul. So my family thought, ‘Poor little Sylvia, she’s just a little scaredy-cat.’ But at Berkeley, all that changed. I got liberated. I got liberated big-time. And I’ve changed. I was hungry for the experience that I had been deprived of as a child.”

Hart Wright’s nonconformist life has been dedicated to peace, to change, to activism, and to love. And those things didn’t always love her back. But her experiences continued to shape her life, writing, and relationships, creating a story that resonates with our own present and challenges future generations.

“I hope [readers] come to understand more what it is to be an activist,” Hart Wright says. “I…hope they understand something about what these movements are about and what they’ve accomplished….Even if the book isn’t about civil rights per se, certainly certain elements are. It’s an ongoing battle. But we have to keep fighting.”

Based in Toronto, Hannah Guy is a writer and copywriter who specializes in books, books, and more books.