In 2011 Susan Coll routinely walked Reno Road. At the time, her marriage of almost 30 years was breaking up. And she was reading a lot of memoirs by women who’d gone through their own major life crises.

But Coll, who moved a lot as a child and then followed her journalist husband to various postings around the world, wasn’t interested in hiking along the West Coast, like Cheryl Strayed, or searching for her true self in foreign lands, like Elizabeth Gilbert.