Award-winning writer Marjorie Sandor presents her first nonfiction collection. These twenty essays form a startlingly honest and passionate memoir: of her childhood in Southern California, young married life in Florida, and early motherhood in Montana; of finding "home" in Oregon; of falling in love outside her marriage, leaving her husband, and remaking her life.Sandor is bold and heretical, witty and learned. She brings to these works the electricity and thrilling imagination that inform her highly acclaimed fiction. From fishing in an alligator-infested lake and hiking through grizzly territory to seeking a way to ease her daughter's pain after separating from her husband, she explores wildness and solace in both the outdoors and the mind."The Night Gardener" is more than a memoir; it is also a quest. Literature, music, fly fishing, gardening as an expression of our deepest selves, and the nature of memory are its subjects. Ultimately, finding the possibility of transcendence through storytelling is Sandor's impressive accomplishment.Each essay is dramatic and beautifully formed -- full of wit and the author's insatiably curious mind. She is a writer of glorious talent, able to wield this last with the control and virtuosity of the true artist.