Memoir is a particular sort of genre that, I’ve found, is typically love-it or hate-it or is entered not for the genre or the style; but for the author. It’s rare to pluck down a memoir with an unfamiliar name on the spine. Yet, staring down at Chomp, Chomp, Chomp: How I Survived a Bear Attack & Other Cautionary Tales I felt no spark of recognition at Allena Hansen’s name on the front.

Allena Hansen and her two dogs

Yet, as I read the 329 pages that followed, I felt I came to know her better than I would have if I’d been exposed to her name, life, or story any other way than straight from her own bitingly honest, verging on crude, and desert dry sense of wit.

Cracking the spine of the fresh hard-cover and shuddering at the seductive sound of the crisp pages falling open to page one, my first impressions was secured with the line: “I know that the bear that attacked me has pretty much chewed out the center of my face, and that my scalp-- what might be left of it-- has been clawed and peeled from my head like the rind from a blood orange.”

The same frank and colorful language continues through the rest of the book accompanied by occasional black-and-white photos embedded in the page that pale in comparison to the full color of the words. As she recounts her life, Hansen jumps through a chronological journey from Santa’s workshop as a child and experiencing her first bout of good-humored bad luck, a first marriage ended with passionate lovemaking on the kitchen table (lovemaking to which she wasn’t invited), a non-marriage with a seductive radio voice, a marriage with a doctor who loved being a doctor (perhaps more than he loved being married), motherhood (the kind that comes before a child and after), and eventually her bear attack at the tail end of arguably equally amazing, shocking, or inspirational stories.

Each one she shares with an unwavering sense of acceptance and wit. Even the most chest-wrenching concepts for me to consider living, she recounts surviving through with almost detached humor and crystallized hindsight even as she shares a gang rape and the leveling explosion of her home.

Her sense of understanding of the world and her humor had me hooked and vibing with her very character from her childhood sections when she was rebelliously keen in regards to parental habits and rules.

“I don’t know yet how to say “bullshit,” but the underlying concept is beginning to take root in my preadolescent lexicon,” she wrote.

As she recountings aging through high school, the messages are still ones of deep kinship between myself as reader and the narration before me. She takes ideas that I’ve long thought and felt and puts them down in a curt, succinct statement that echoed even as I kept reading.

“Nothing happened during that time to counteract my suspicion that when you’re twelve years old, life is just terrible, school sucks, and people are no damned good,” (p. 19).

Even recounting an era seperate to my own experiences growing up in the 60’s on the coastline, not-so-briefly dubbing herself a hippie, and rising to be the “Playboy’s token intellectual bimbo” her view of life is so frank that it's impossible not to feel understood and validated.

With each stumble in her life, which she puts to page seemingly without censorship or embarrassment as every word on the page is honest, she recounts the spirit of someone fiercely set on surviving: sometimes for herself, sometimes for proving others wrong, sometimes for the good of a goal. No matter the story or the reason, her spirit, encapsulated as the woman who walked away from a bear attack, drove four miles with her face peeling off, and survived the hours and hours of surgery, is the true reason to read this memoir.

She gives it like it is both in the nuanced details of her own life and in the all encompassing facts of existence as a human. Her writing is engaging because it's so under-decorated, not full of itself in the slightest, just pure from a fierce woman and more importantly, the stories she’s telling are inspirational because in a new year, we all need to remember to have some fighting instincts in us no matter what our bears look like.

Chomp Chomp Chomp can be purchased on Amazon for $15. Since publication in 2014, the book has won the Benjamin Franklin Award from the Independent Book Publishers Association as a Gold winner. If you have read the book and want more of Hansen’s story or voice, there’s plenty to read in her archived Ask Me Anything on Reddit.