Seeking Peace:   Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World. By Mary Pipher.

Mary Pipher hit the best seller lists in 1994 with "Reviving Ophelia".  It was a mixed blessing; she describes it as being "avalanched by roses."  The pressure of  her success caused a nervous breakdown in 2002.  In "Seeking Peace" she writes of her life, her illness and recovery, and the lessons she learned. 

She had a challenging childhood. Her parents were loving but distant and disorganized.  "(W)e kids would wake up and help ourselves to candy bars and cookies for breakfast.  When there was no food in the house, we had the fallback plan of a charge account at the Bridgewater Drugstore.  We could purchase Mounds bars of vanilla Cokes, two foods that for many years were the basic staples of our diet.  One of my favorite after-school snacks was a bowl of Crisco mixed with sugar." (Page 82.) 

 After her breakdown - a low-drama event - she decided to learn to take care of herself.  She cut back on her speeches and appearances,  scaled back on watching the news and reading about genocides.  She tried to learn to accept herself as she was: "My constant efforts to improve had been a form of self aggression." (Page 161.)   She let other people answer the phone,  cooked comfort food, petted her cat and bought herself flowers,  and took up meditation.   Meditation was difficult for her, and it was often hard to carry the sense of peace she found over into the rest of her life - thus the subtitle of the book.   

My favorite quote of the book is this:  "Aunt Margaret told me that if I lived my life as a nonreader, I could experience seventy or eighty years of the world, but if I read,  I could enjoy three thousand years of the world's most enlightening thoughts and stories."  (Page 42.) 

Highly recommended, not just because she's a wonderful writer with many great stories to tell, but also because she writes about how she learned to take care of herself.  That's a skill many people never learn, and I appreciate her description of what she did and how she did it.