In the autumn of 2000, Hope Edelman was a woman adrift, questioning her place in her marriage, her profession, and the larger world. Feeling vulnerable and isolated, she was primed for change. Into her stagnant routine dropped Dodo, her three-year old daughter Maya’s curiously disruptive imaginary friend. Dodo is ever-present and becoming more aggressive by the day, forcing Edelman to confront the possibility that something is going seriously awry with her child. After consulting mainstream health professionals for help and getting nowhere, Edelman and her husband made the unlikely choice to bring their daughter to Mayan healers in Belize, hoping that they might help banish Dodo—and, as they came to understand, all he represented—from their lives.

Examining how an otherwise mainstream mother and wife finds herself making this unorthodox choice, The Possibility of Everything chronicles the magical week in Central America that transformed Edelman from a person whose past had led her to believe only in the visible and the “proven” to someone open to the idea of larger, unseen forces. A deeply affecting and beautifully written memoir of a family’s emotional journey, it explores what Edelman and her husband went looking for in the jungle and what they ultimately discovered—as parents, as spouses, and as ordinary people—about the things that possess and destroy, or that can heal us all.