In middle age, the author came across the journal she had kept during her adolescence. She set out to reconstruct that quest, which had taken her to the study of science and through a cataclysmic series of 'mystical' experiences. A staunch atheist, she is profoundly shaken by the implications of her lifelong search. Part memoir, part philosophical and spiritual inquiry, it brings an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's uninhibited musings on the questions that torment all.