IN A MEMORY, Manjula Martin is a child and follows her father, brother, and stepmother through the Sierra Nevada on her first multiday backpacking trip. Whenever the family passes a glacial lake, her father promises a dollar to whoever jumps and stays in the longest. Repeatedly, Martin proves unafraid of piercing cold and momentary physical discomfort—notes the writer: “I win the dollar every time.”
Martin confronts more complex challenges in the form of relentless, flame-ferrying heat and chronic pain in her new memoir, The Last Fire Season. This unsettling, timely book traces the dual fallout from the author’s botched hysterectomy and the 2020 California wildfires, during which an approximate 9,900 fires burned 4.3 million acres in California—twice the previous record. Forced to evacuate Sonoma County mid-August, Martin and her partner Max seek refuge everywhere from the coasts of Santa Cruz to the foothills of the Sierras. But safety doesn’t guarantee peace of mind. Even removed from the blaze and bluster of the Diablo winds, the writer’s “nightly routine of watching the slow apocalypse unfurl across [her] tiny blue screen” seeds profound anxiety.
