Inside the Flames: The Untold Story of a Hotshot’s Fierce Battle for Survival
Before becoming a hotshot, Selby struggled with a difficult childhood and adolescence. Their mother lived an unstable life while suffering from serious mental health struggles. Selby abused drugs and partied as a teen. In addition to their transformation as a firefighter, Selby narrates their own internal struggles with an eating disorder throughout both their teenage years and their tenure as a hotshot.
While observing how nature responds to, and heals itself from, wildfire, Selby observes that not all healing is meant to happen in a neat and linear manner: “It will take a long time for the land to completely regenerate, if that’s what it’s meant to do. The premise of land ‘healing’ falsely assumes that ‘healed’ is an endpoint when in truth everything is cyclical. Nature has no endpoint.” Selby’s own healing throughout the memoir has no easy endpoint either, particularly when personal tragedy strikes near the end of the book. But healing and regenerating were never the end goal: rather, their suffering was a cycle of slow and deliberate growth to be embraced, not avoided.
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