In this intimate intellectual memoir, Pagels, a Princeton professor of religion and author (The Gnostic Gospels), reveals the personal tragedies that accompanied her scholarly milestones. Raised evangelical, she has her first religious shift in her teens in Palo Alto, after the death of a close Jewish friend. (Jerry Garcia, later of the Grateful Dead, was also injured in the car accident.) In 1987 she and her husband, theoretical physicist Heinz Pagels, lost their first child, a son born with a heart condition, at age six. The following year, Heinz was killed in a mountain climbing accident. Pagels details life after his death in all its rawness, the comfort that comes from religion, including meditating with members of a Trappist community, and how these tragedies shaped her further work.