Just over a dozen years ago, Californian social worker Angelica Glass casually remarked to her wife that she was planning to walk every street in their home county of Santa Cruz --- urban, rural, desert, forest, wasteland, beachfront, all of it. The journey began in 2013, lasted seven years and 15 pairs of shoes, and eventually gave birth to her compelling memoir, SCAVENGING BEAUTY.

Those hundreds of miles on foot weren’t simply about doing something memorable for its own sake. It was only when the project was well underway that Glass, middle-aged and at the peak of a successful career, began sifting through reawakened memories of a dysfunctional and traumatic childhood that her adult self had never quite come to terms with.

As someone professionally dedicated to helping victims of trauma and domestic abuse restore their identities and lives, Glass had lived most of hers in survival mode, lacking much of the help she was trained to give others.

"[T]he vast majority of readers will come away, as I did, with feelings of gratitude, appreciation and even resolution for how our own imperfect but unique lives turned out. Ten thumbs up for this one."

Born into a family of eight children with a relentlessly abusive, mentally ill mother (later diagnosed with bipolar disorder) and an alcoholic father, Glass and her siblings never experienced how “normal” middle-class American households lived until their high school years. 

Daily life outside the home and developing social connections began revealing startling and frightening contrasts between their well-dressed, regularly fed friends and the dirty, feral, academically indifferent Glass children, who were often teased by classmates and publicly rebuked by teachers. 

Through long hours of recuperative walking, Glass finally found a safe environment in which to probe the darker and more painful memories that surrounded her childhood, adolescence and much of her early adulthood. She soon took to recording her impressions and reflecting on what had surfaced. Those notes and memories eventually would coalesce into SCAVENGING BEAUTY.

Given the underlying framework of a populous California county with nearly 300,000 residents and 1,295 officially mapped streets (although Glass did find a few uncharted ones), SCAVENGING BEAUTY is anything but a walking-tour kind of guide. She names a few streets and roads, but they are merely a catalyst for an ever-changing series of human and natural environments that sharpened her physical senses, tested her endurance, and opened closed or even unused parts of her mind to new awareness.

Usually walking alone, over time Glass became less fearful of what the recesses of her memory might reveal and began experiencing little epiphanies between the footsteps --- moments of understanding, resolution and even closure on traumas that would be appalling if any of our children experienced them. 

Another crucial element that makes SCAVENGING BEAUTY so powerful is the pictures. Actually, there are no pictures in the book at all. The reader has to imagine them, which surprisingly didn’t feel like a shortcoming at all. 

When Glass discovered as a confused and restless teen how to use a manual camera, photography became a way of seeing and processing the world on her own terms, and it was a vital interpretive tool on every walk. She describes how gratifying it was to find just the right image to capture the essence of every street she explored. Perhaps photography could be the subject of a future book.

Another unusual, but in this case essential, facet of SCAVENGING BEAUTY was that Glass took the courageous decision to make it a collaborative effort. Although she is the sole author, she interviewed all of her siblings to ensure that some of the most foundational memories were corroborated by those who also lived them with her.

As each chapter of the book was completed, she read it to them in online meetings. Since the eight sisters and brothers were born across a span of nearly two decades, there were a number of revelations that they all shared for the first time. But all of them supported her work. How many families would be brave enough to do this?

As brilliant and transformative as SCAVENGING BEAUTY is, it does contain some very visceral descriptions of physical, sexual and mental child abuse and deprivation. But once warned, the vast majority of readers will come away, as I did, with feelings of gratitude, appreciation and even resolution for how our own imperfect but unique lives turned out. Ten thumbs up for this one.