“A luminous meditation on growing up with empty pockets but a heart full of wildflowers, this memoir wanders barefoot through forests, riverbeds, and verses, gathering wisdom like stones. It’s not about what was lacked, but what was found—in nature, in language, and in the quiet, never-ending act of becoming. I can’t stop thinking about this book.”
—JAMIE FORD, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

“I couldn’t put Raised by Ferns down. Maya Jewell Zeller writes so beautifully about the deep difficulty of understanding oneself fully. Once a child growing up in precarity and now an adult trying to ethically navigate her privileged positions, she writes with honesty and insight about what it means to embrace all of the different versions of themselves a person has been. The author of the influential essay “The Privilege Button,” in this memoir about growing up “in a van by the river,” as her son once describes her childhood, Zeller shows readers what it means to belong to an earth that is always moving beneath our feet, terrifying in her unpredictable changing, but also springing forth new berries and fish and fiddlehead ferns that can sustain a family through this day and the next. A thoughtful consideration of the myriad forms childhood poverty can take and the impacts it can have, this is also a memoir about learning to love the wildly reckless, confused, and brave child she once was. What does it mean to have been the kind of kid who would run away by leaping from a moving van and the kind who would protect her little sister when their father’s foreboding moods settled over the house? Beneath such a childhood's deep forest of shadows, surrounded by unfurling ferns, Zeller became the kind of woman who can write this book that shows us how to see the world around us in such beautiful, magical, compassionate, clear-eyed ways.”
—KATHRYN NUERNBERGER, author of The Witch of Eye