Hungry for the World: A Memoir

Kim Barnes's award-winning memoir, In the Wilderness, was called "elegiac" and "eloquent" by the San Francisco Chronicle; Library Journal said it "forces reconsideration of the form." Her new book is a bold and beautiful personal narrative--the story of a young woman's trying to save herself when all she has believed has been stripped away.
On the day of Kim Barnes's 1976 high school graduation in Lewiston, Idaho, after a disagreement with her father--a logger by lifelong trade, and a fervent adherent of the Pentecostal Christian faith in which Kim had been raised--she gathered her few belongings and struck out on her own. Alone for the first time, she sought to make a life for herself--without skills, without funds, with barely a shred of knowledge of the world outside the insulated confines of her family.
Hungry for the World is the story of how an intelligent and passionate young woman, thirsting for experience of what lay out there, rejected the patriarchal domination of family and church and tried to find her way, only to be all but undone at the hands of a man whose dominance was of an altogether different sort. It is a classic story of the search for knowledge and the consequences, both dire and beautiful, of that search. Barnes's story breaks the code of imposed by shame and maps a trail of hope through the swamp of human failure and survival.