The Way Through The Woods: Of Mushrooms and Mourning

“It felt as if someone had slammed me with a huge sledgehammer…. Just a few hours ago we were a married couple…..Now Eiolf was at the Emergency Ward at Ullevål Hospital. Dead and cold.”

This is a story about a journey that started abruptly when the author’s life collapsed. In the midst of paralyzing grief, she stumbles upon the wondrous world of mushrooms. In the process, she befriends the Mushroom Pickers, a tribe with their own unspoken rules and rites of passage. As she sets out on a voyage of discovery into the realm of fungi, she ventures along a parallel journey through an inner landscape of pain and sorrow.
As Long takes the reader through this simultaneously funny and heartbreaking story, her unusual, personal quest soon feels familiar; at it’s underlying core the story is one of common human experience. We are introduced to mushrooms not only as food or poison, but also their natural history and cultural significance. In the book, the author unveils how the combination of mushrooms and grief triggers fundamental changes in her life by creating new meaning and identity.

Told in a clear and strong narrative voice, the author’s enthusiasm for mushrooms is particularly charming and is also likely to be contagious.