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, heartbreak, and midlife reckoning, Andrea Hogan knew something had to change. Juggling motherhood, career pressure, and the slow devastation of her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, she made a radical choice: she stopped. She laced up her boots, packed her mother’s old Camino diary, and set out to walk more than 500 miles across Spain on the Camino de Santiago.

Years earlier, her mother had walked the same pilgrimage—just before memory began to slip away. Now, Andrea follows those footsteps through vineyards and villages, solitude and laughter, faith and frustration. As the road unfolds, so does a deeper reckoning with grief, identity, and the complicated beauty of becoming someone new while someone you love is disappearing.

The Closest Thing to Magic is part travel memoir, part love letter, and part midlife awakening. With warmth, honesty, and quiet humor, Hogan explores motherhood, memory, caregiving, and the invisible labor of loving someone through Alzheimer’s. It’s a story about what we lose, what we carry forward, and the unexpected ways a pilgrimage can help us reclaim ourselves.

For readers drawn to Camino de Santiago memoirs, mother–daughter stories, Alzheimer’s caregiver journeys, and reflective travel narratives, this book offers companionship, insight, and hope. Ultimately, it reminds us that home is not always a place—it’s the self we slowly learn to return to.