Women now go into the field of psychiatry and seek therapy far more than do men. Like novels, life coaches, and Taylor Swift, females gravitate more toward discussing their lives for an ostensibly therapeutic purpose than do men.
This results in all sorts of if-only-more-men-saw-psychiatrists handwringing. Rather than indict men for not wanting to talk about feelings with a stranger inside an office, why not ponder reasons why men might find such an environment not to their liking and explore how the sexes — or even how individuals — differ in their pursuit of emotional and psychiatric healing?
Tad Crawford, perhaps subconsciously, does this in an excellent new novel, A Woman in the Wild.
“Psychology, religion, mythology, cults, the occult, astrology — every book is about the path of the soul,” Crawford writes. “There are different paths and obstacles, but the destination is the same.”
The book follows two main characters, Thea and Luke; the former a therapist in need of one and the latter an unwilling patient and perhaps unwitting therapist.
Both characters struggle with loss.
“Two years had passed since Delphina’s decision not to see her mother,” A Woman in Wild informs. “At first, Thea hoped her daughter would return to her. She reached out again and again. Delphina rebuffed her, pleaded with her to stop.”
Thea had taken her husband’s side against an allegation made by her daughter. Ultimately, she regrets this and loses both.
Luke, whose name we learn only after many chapters, loses the one closest to him — and deals with it most unconventionally.
“Not only did he have a name,” we learn, “but he had been happily married. His wife had died, and in his grief he somehow came to wander the mountain with the bear.”
Not only this, but Luke reverts to sublingual, crawling-on-all-fours, animal characteristics. This atavism generates widespread attention from the media — and intense attention from Thea.
“What was unique about him was not his face or physique but the suspended instant of fluid motion that would bring him to all fours like an animal,” the book explains. “Could he really have shed millennia of human culture and development to return to this wild state?”
The loss of a loved one, essentially stripping Luke of what makes him human, provides an especially difficult, if especially interesting, subject for the therapists. He becomes, predictably, especially interesting to Thea.
A Woman in the Wild explores loss, regret, mortality, and other big questions. Can we heal our inner selves through the outdoors? Are we able to clean up the messiness of our lives within an antiseptic, indoor office? Does lying on a couch lend itself to getting back on your feet? Such questions provoke those in therapy to seek therapy for their years spent in therapy.
László Krasznahorkai, the recipient of the 2025 Nobel Prize in literature, opined earlier this year that “art is humanity’s extraordinary response to the sense of lostness that is our fate.” Tad Crawford’s A Woman in the Wild reads as a captivating illustration of that definition.
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