The Closest Thing to Magic - The Camino de Santiago: Through My Mother's Forgetting And My Own Becoming #940668

“Some journeys take you across countries. Others take you home.”

At the edge of burnout, hormones, and heartbreak, Andrea Hogan knew something had to give. After years of chasing deadlines, promotions and holding everything together, she realized she’d lost sight of herself somewhere between the meetings and the mayhem. So she did what most people only dream about: she stopped. She packed her mother’s old Camino diary, laced up her boots, and set off alone to walk 500 miles across Spain.

Years earlier, her mother had walked the same pilgrimage, just before Alzheimer’s began to steal her sense of self. Now Andrea follows her footsteps—through vineyards and villages, laughter and loss, the sacred and the ridiculous—piecing together the woman her mother was and the one she herself is becoming.

Part travelogue, part love letter, part midlife reckoning, The Closest Thing to Magic is an unvarnished, often funny, always heartfelt exploration of motherhood, memory and the beautiful chaos of figuring out who you’ve become—and who you still want to be. It’s a story about what we lose, what we keep, and the surprising ways we find our way home—not to a place, but to ourselves.