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(These are notes on an audio version of this book.)
As a personal memoir, there's quite a bit here. Goldberg talks about her early life, the emptiness and desolation she felt in the middle-class world of her childhood, her discovery of a great interest in inner work, her marriage and divorce, and especially her relationship to Dainin Katagiri, the founder of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, and what it was like to be his student, and the impact on her of his death. There's not a vast amount of insight here; she just tells it like it was, and if she eventually (for instance) came to terms with her childhood, there's no particular evidence of it here. But it's a story, and stories are good.
(One particularly good story is about her first noticed bit of awakening or kensho or touch of the Goddess; it happened when she was a school teacher, and her interactions with her class were impressively transformed by the feelings of freedom she got from it (although those feelings also led her to quit school teaching and go off to find herself; the poor class probably got stuck with some less awakened replacement).)
As a book about Zen it strikes me as more or less a cautionary tale, about the danger of becoming attached to a teacher. There's really very little about Zen or Buddhism or meditation in the book; those subjects come up only secondarily, where they are part of her relationship to Katagiri. She is devastated by his death, and apparently remained (or remains) more or less devastated for many years afterwards; although I'm afraid it's cruel to point it out, this is not a terribly good testimonial to the benefits of twenty years of Zen practice on one's equanimity.
The audio book version that I listened to has an appendix interview with Goldberg about things that happened after the book was done. The book was also read by Goldberg herself. In a way that was nice; I like the idea of hearing the author read her own work. But in this case the reading is rather monotonous and uninterested-sounding; I'm not sure if Goldberg was tired when doing the reading, or if that's just how her voice sounds. I did get used to it eventually, but a more (what?) evocative reading might have raised my impression of the book as a whole.
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