Have you ever wrapped up the closing pages of a book and felt like your DNA had been altered?

Such is the case for me with Michelle Dowd's extraordinary "Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult," a fierce and remarkable story of Dowd's birth into an ultra-religious cult known by members as The Field that existed on a mountain within the Angeles National Forest and where she was raised to be prepared for the end of the world but also where she learned how to survive by foraging for what she needed.

"Forager" is a book that I stumbled across, a mutual friend of Dowd's talking about the book on social media raised my own curiosity as I am always seeking out the unique and inspired voices of other survivors who have somehow learned to love and heal and be tender despite living in worlds where just the opposite was true.

Again, such is the case in "Forager."

"Forager" is a heartbreaking tale, at times difficult to read yet most times impossible to not read. Led by her grandfather, The Field's patriarchal rules and literal interpretation of the Bible subjected Michelle and her siblings into extreme deprivation, isolation, and starvation for both love and food and security. In this environment, Dowd was forced to surviving by learning the skills necessary to battle hunger, thirst, and cold. She learned to trust animals. She learned to trust nature. She learned to not trust human beings including those most would call family. She survived by foraging until she reached an age when she realized she had the ability to survive and the strength to survive. She learned about herself and nature and would ultimately have the strength to use this knowledge to survive the apocalyptic cult she lived in, I dare not call it home, during most of her childhood years.

There is a rhythm contained within "Forager" that I can't forget and I can't simply set aside. It is part familiarity, though in much different ways as someone who grew up a Jehovah's Witness in a severely disabled body who has been sexually assaulted far more than I've ever been loved and who now, even in this moment, deals with cancer while learning how to survive once again and love once again. My journey has been different yet I felt Dowd's journey way down deep in my bones.

The rhythm of "Forager" is one of survival and learning what love is and how to reach it. It's learning how to escape but also learning how to live free. At times, "Forager" feels like a forest chant of sacred rhythms as Dowd's vulnerability peacefully co-exists with her awe-inspiring strength and tenderness.

If you know me, you know that tenderness is my favorite word. Tenderness radiates throughout "Forager" through the wonder of this human being who learns how to love not because The Field tells her to or because the bible tells her to but because it's who she is and it could not be destroyed.

She could not be destroyed.

Each chapter opens with illustrations of edible plants along with a description of their value and purpose. The first chapter found me thinking "This is weird." By the end? I was in tears realizing how this knowledge had helped Dowd survive.

"Forager" is simultaneously haunting and exhilarating, an immersive reading experience that demands surrender to the knowledge of the evil that we humans can do to one another masking it as love when it is nothing like love. The Angeles National Forest is an urban national forest, a place both isolated yet also within grasp of the humanity that Dowd occasionally reached out for whether hospitalized or cleaning homes or simply taking baby steps toward the world around her.

At its core, "Forager" is a meditation on the ways the world around us can heal us and on the ways we can, in turn, heal ourselves and heal one another. Often haunting and stark and always impossible to forget, "Forager" is a masterpiece of hope and field notes for the journey toward a magnificent freedom.

Written by Richard Propes
The Independent Critic