A funny, fierce, imaginative memoir chronicling New York Times bestselling author and Academy Honor champion Shirley MacLaine’s remarkable encounters filming Crazy Oats in the Canary Islands and the extraordinary memories her time there brought forth of the past life in the dropped continent of Atlantis.

Her agent advised her never to can get on the plane. The male leads weren’t also cast. The funding was shaky at greatest. The script had been rewritten countless occasions. And yet something about Crazy Oats about Above the Series: My Wild Oats Adventure lured Shirley MacLaine towards the film’s location capture in the far-off Canary Islands-and straight to the center of one of the most exciting and paradigm-shifting ventures of her life.

The making of the film reads like a screwball comedy, as the cast and crew face unstable daily obstacles with ingenuity, grit, and personal sacrifice. The chaos leads Shirley to a revelatory new knowledge of the demise of one of history’s most elusive yet endlessly intriguing places. Scholars have lengthy theorized that Spain’s Canary Islands will be the remnants of the mighty lost continent of Atlantis. As the movie set descends into pandemonium, Shirley finds fascinating corollaries between the island’s cataclysmic destiny and our very own dangerous trajectory. Can we find out the lessons the citizens of Atlantis failed to comprehend?

The answer is borne out of recovered memories from Shirley’s past life on Atlantis and through some meditations that reveal the necessity of unfettered imagination while searching for bold new truths, rendering this evocative, irreverent, and honest memoir essential reading for anybody seeking a broader understanding of what this means to be human-both where we came from and where we are going.