“I've got a hundred bear stories,” says Alaska-native Leigh Newman, author of the splendid new memoir Still Points North. Getting up close and personal with grizzlies was an everyday part of her adventurous upbringing. Other common off-the-grid activities included flying up into the mountains to drain new fishing holes, going on solo walkabouts to pick wildflowers, examining the contents of a dead caribou’s stomach, and getting stranded on a rapidly-flooding island. (Well, once anyway.) How ever wild and woolly Newman’s childhood was, though, no amount of time in the outback prepared her for dealing with her parents' bitter divorce. “The Last Frontier” isn't Alaska, it’s the human heart.

During summers and holidays, Newman was raised by a rugged outdoors-man in Anchorage, learning survival skills that would make Jack London proud. The rest of the year was spent in Baltimore, attending a refined girls’ school steeped in the classics, while trying to help her mother who struggled mentally, emotionally, and financially. To cope, Newman compartmentalized, living as two different people, 5,000 miles apart. A fearless independent spirit was forged out of her Alaska-Maryland duality, but the marital dissolution behind it also led to a deep fear of committing to anything ... Even, later in life, to the man she loves.

Newman nails the enchantment of being a kid free to explore the natural world, the pain of not understanding why the human one has to complicate it, and the confusion of becoming an adult and trying to reconcile it all. Being an Alaska native myself, and someone raised within striking distance of the Montana mountains, during the same 1970s era of divorce, in a town with similar DNA to Anchorage, whose own parents eventually split up ... I frequently felt like Still Points North was written just for me. It wasn't, but it’s always a thrill when great writing hits so close to home.

These days, Newman lives in Brooklyn, with her husband Lawrence and two sons, writing in between parenting and her gig as an Oprah.com editor. Her relatively normal life may not be as crazy as her Alaskan youth, but Newman’s compass, both navigational and moral, is forever pointed north.

Biographile: Let’s begin by talking about Alaska as a physical place, it has such a strong mythology about it. What makes it so unique?

Leigh Newman: In Alaska, you’ll find places that nobody has ever been to, or maybe one person came here years ago in an airplane and left no trace. There’s a great feeling to that, to go places where nobody has gone before. You are an animal, living and breathing nature with no other people around. I've heard it’s the same in the Brazilian rain forests, but I feel like Alaska is one of the few places in the world where you can walk new ground because it’s so inaccessible. The culture definitely teaches a self-reliance at an early age.

Biog: Are there any Alaskan writers you were reading during the three-years it took you to finish Still Points North?

LN: I purposely didn't read Alaska writers. I didn't want to write about anyone else’s Alaska, and I didn't want to be intimidated. Memoirs are fingerprints of a time period, and they need that visual quality, so the book I really looked at was Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. That book turned everything around for me. Her approach to the landscapes of Africa and the craziness of her family is filled with celebration, and energy. I love Alaska, and yes, I know I could’ve died when our plane fell out of the sky, or the grizzly came into our tent, but I loved it. I wanted readers to feel my crazy wild childhood, but not in a mournful way. It’s half a love letter to growing up, and half a love letter to my husband and how he coped with that legacy.

Biog: In popular culture, like say Into the Wild, Alaska comes across as this completely inhospitable foreboding place. Is it?

LN: I don’t feel that way. It’s tough and it’s possible you can die, but everyone in Alaska frames it as "everything that can go wrong is your fault." I remember reading Into the Wild and when he gets out of the bus without any boots thinking, "Come on, really?" I know he was confused and lost, but you have to shake your head at the hubris. Alaska is serious and demands being taken seriously, but growing up in nature brings great joy. Seeing bears and floating down rivers ... It was freeing. The 1970s and the wilderness conflated in my head. It may have been too hands-off, but I would spend hours and hours out in the woods, fishing or just playing. As a kid, it fostered my imagination. You have so little power at that age, but knowing I could catch and prepare my own food, start a fire, pitch a tent, it was incredible. Occasionally, scary things would happen, like when our tent flooded, but ninety percent of the time, it was "let’s get out there and do something amazing." I assumed everybody lived like that. It took me a long time to realize Alaskans live differently.

Biog: Speaking of the 1970s -- and maybe this isn't true for everybody -- but in Billings Mont., where I grew up, divorced parents were as common as married ones. It was a different time for parenting, hard to fathom in a lot of ways...

LN: Still Points North is different than a lot of memoirs in one way, I really love my parents and think they raised me the best that they could. In part, I want to celebrate the radical approach they used. Whatever choices they made, they went all the way. It’s a quality I would like to have more of in my own life. But that culture of divorce in the 1970s and 80s, when America was at its highest point, comes out of a time period when young parents were trying to figure out who they were. I think we underestimate the effects of the Vietnam War, whether they were in or not, and the newfound personal freedoms and all the social upheaval that came with it. You can’t be all over your kids when you’re undergoing major personal changes, having marital problems, and thinking about upending your life.

Biog: Your father wasn't hands-off, though, didn't he take you just about everywhere?

LN: My father spent an inordinate amount of time with me growing up. Whatever he was doing, I was doing. If that meant flying into the wilderness to hunt caribou, I was his co-pilot. My dad was a runner, so he had me running 10Ks in fourth-grade. He taught me how to sew little patches and stuff for Brownies, and then bought me my first sewing machine. Alaskans tend to be Renaissance-like in interests. They've left the lower 48 for something different, or they don’t quite fit in, which often coincides with high I.Q.s or different approaches to life. I am not the only one with a "Great Alaskan Dad." I know a dozen girls with fathers who flew helicopters, cooked fresh food, played the cello, and climbed Mt. McKinley without dying.

Biog: Billings and Anchorage are similar, so I’m guessing there was a fair amount of illicit frontier behavior?

LN: When I was growing up, Anchorage was a cowtown. It’s larger and more cosmopolitan today. Back then, my mom tried to bring in a bit of culture by putting on an opera, in a Quonset hut. High school was kind of a train wreck for me. There was a lot of drinking, and we’d hang out at this famous bar Chilkoot Charlie’s, with every kind of creepy guy a 16-year-old should not be running into. People were constantly getting shot. My housekeeper’s husband shot his own son, our babysitter’s boyfriend raped and killed a woman ... There was a lot of lunacy taking place, but by the grace of God, I skated through it.

Biog: To someone raised in an urban environment, coming face-to-face with bears sounds incredibly dangerous, and "how could any parent let their children out of the house?" But flip it around, and folks in the wilderness would have the same feeling on putting a 10-year-old on the subway alone--

LN: (Laughs) My dad has said exactly that! He can’t get over the fact that I live in New York. He’s constantly worried about me being a mother here. All mothers here, actually.

Biog: You find commonalities between New York City and Alaska in the book, because it’s all about heightened experiences, isn't it? Philosophically, don’t they share more things than a place in the middle?

LN: That’s true. When I was started dusting off the bones of what was there and connecting things together, I realized Alaska prepared me for these intense places all over the world. I understood how people lived in radical situations. New York City is a survival culture. For example, New Yorkers are acutely aware of the temperature and the day’s weather, just like in Alaska. In both cases, people spend so much time outside. People are tough, blunt, and honest in New York, just like home. When I first moved here in the early 1990s, I was living on the Lower East Side. It was rough. I was always aware of my surroundings, who was in my space, and what their physical relationship was to me out on the sidewalks. My neighborhood was filled with drug addicts and dealers. I viewed them the same way as bears. Stay away and stay alive.

Biog: Your dad had a classic lone wolf D.I.Y.-saying, "can’t lives on won’t street," which is great advice for field dressing a caribou, but yet he couldn't discuss the most important thing in your life. Did he recognize that he didn't talk you through the divorce?

LN: I know my dad knew that he couldn't talk because I know that his father never talked to him. When my father’s father was dying, they never discussed it. He never told him the things kids need to hear. I was alive when my dad’s sister committed suicide, again, nobody discussed it. So dad was acutely aware and wanted to be better. However, he and I share the same problem, in that we both think we’re talking to people and we haven’t said anything. We’d go fishing or hiking, and he felt like we talked for hours. We didn't He was not the proverbial dad ignoring his kid from behind a newspaper, but he wasn't a talker. He was in the garage gutting an animal, calling me in to see a dead mouse in the stomach, or taking me out to collecting wildflowers. He thought he was talking through his actions. At the age of ten, it was hard to discern what he was saying. And that’s when I filled in the stories, wondering if the divorce was my fault.