Oprah''s Book Club 2.0 selection.
A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an
eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling
from catastrophe-and built her back up again.
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In
the wake of her mother''s death, her family scattered and her own
marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to
lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the
Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and
Oregon to Washington State-and to do it alone. She had no
experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more
than "an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise." But it
was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.
Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and
record snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail.
Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and
humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of
one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that
maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
"A rich, riveting true story . . . During her grueling three-month
journey, Strayed circled around black bears and rattlesnakes,
fought extreme dehydration by drinking oily gray pond water, and
hiked in boots made entirely of duct tape. Reading her
matter-of-fact take on love and grief and the soul-saving quality
of a Snapple lemonade, you can understand why Strayed has earned a
cult following as the author of Dear Sugar, a popular advice column
on therumpus.net. . . . With its vivid descriptions of beautiful
but unforgiving terrain,
Wild is a cinematic story, but
Strayed's book isn't really about big, cathartic moments. The
author never 'finds herself' or gets healed. When she reaches the
trail's end, she buys a cheap ice cream cone and continues down the
road. . . . It's hard to imagine anything more important than
taking one step at a time. That's endurance, and that's what
Strayed understands, almost 20 years later. As she writes, 'There
was only one [option], I knew. To keep walking.' Our verdict: A."
-Melissa Maerz,
Entertainment Weekly
"Strayed's journey was as transcendent as it was turbulent. She
faced down hunger, thirst, injury, fatigue, boredom, loss, bad
weather, and wild animals. Yet she also reached new levels of joy,
accomplishment, courage, peace, and found extraordinary
companionship." -Marjorie Kehe,
Christian Science
Monitor
"It's not very manly, the topic of weeping while reading. Yet for a
book critic tears are an occupational hazard. Luckily, perhaps,
books don't make me cry very often. Turning pages, I'm practically
Steve McQueen. Strayed's memoir,
Wild, however, pretty
much obliterated me. I was reduced, during her book's final third,
to puddle-eyed cretinism. I like to read in coffee shops, and I
began to receive concerned glances from matronly women, the kind of
looks that said, 'Oh, honey.' To mention all this does Strayed a
bit of a disservice, because there's nothing cloying about
Wild. It's uplifting, but not in the way of many memoirs,
where the uplift makes you feel that you're committing mental
suicide. This book is as loose and sexy and dark as an early
Lucinda Williams song. It's got a punk spirit and makes an earthy
and American sound. . . .
Wild recounts the months Strayed
spent when she was 26, hiking alone on the Pacific Crest Trail from
the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington
State. There were very frightening moments, but the author was not
chewed on by bears, plucked dangling from the edge of a pit, buried
by an avalanche or made witness to the rapture. No dingo ate
anyone's baby. Yet everything happened. The clarity of Ms.
Strayed's prose, and thus of her person, makes her story, in its
quiet way, nearly as riveting an adventure narrative as Jon
Krakauer's
Into the Wild and
Into Thin Air. . . .
Her grief, early in this book, is as palpable as her confusion. Her
portrait of her mother, who died of cancer at 45, is raw and bitter
and reverent all at once. . . .
Wild is thus the story of
an unfolding. She got tougher, mentally as well as physically [and
she] tells good, scary stories about nearly running out of water,
encountering leering men and dangerous animals. . . The lack of
ease in her life made her fierce and funny; she hammers home her
hard-won sentences like a box of nails. The cumulative welling up I
experienced during
Wild was partly a response to that too
infrequent sight: that of a writer finding her voice, and
sustaining it, right in front of your eyes." -Dwight Garner,
The New York Times
"One of the most original, heartbreaking and beautiful American
memoirs in years. . . . The unlikely journey is awe-inspiring, but
it''s one of the least remarkable things about the book. Strayed,
who was recently revealed as the anonymous author of the 'Dear
Sugar' advice column of the literary website
The Rumpus,
writes with stunningly authentic emotional resonance-
Wild
is brutal and touching in equal measures, but there''s nothing
forced about it. She chronicles sorrow and loss with unflinching
honesty, but without artifice or self-pity. There are no easy
answers in life, she seems to be telling the reader. Maybe there
are no answers at all. It''s fitting, perhaps, that the writer
chose to end her long pilgrimage at the Bridge of the Gods, a
majestic structure that stretches a third of a mile across the
Columbia, the largest river in the Pacific Northwest. We think of
bridges as separating destinations, just as we think of long
journeys as the price we have to pay to get from one place to
another. Sometimes, though, the journey is the destination, and the
bridge connects more than just dots on a map-it joins reality with
the dream world, the living with the dead, the tame with the wild."
-Michael Schaub,
NPR Books
"Brilliant. . . pointedly honest . . . Part adventure narrative,
part deeply personal reflection,
Wild chronicles an
adventure born of heartbreak. . . . While it is certain that the
obvious dangers of the trail are real - the cliffs are high, the
path narrow, the ice slick, and the animal life wild - the book's
greatest achievement lies in its exploration of the author's
emotional landscape. With flashbacks as organic and natural as
memory itself, Strayed mines the bedrock of her past to reveal what
rests beneath her compulsion to hike alone across more than one
thousand primitive miles: her biological father's abuse and
abandonment, her mother's diagnosis and death, and her family's
unraveling. Strayed emerges from her grief-stricken journey as a
practitioner of a rare and vital vocation. She has become an
intrepid cartographer of the human heart." -Bruce Machart,
Houston Chronicle
"Strayed writes a crisp scene; her sentences hum with energy. She
can describe a trail-parched yearning for Snapple like no writer I
know. She moves us briskly along the route, making discrete rest
stops to parcel out her backstory. It becomes impossible not to
root for her." -Karen R. Long,
The Cleveland Plain
Dealer
"[A] vivid, touching and ultimately inspiring account of a life
unraveling, and of the journey that put it back together. . . . The
darkness is relieved by self-deprecating humor as [Strayed]
chronicles her hiking expedition and the rebirth it helped to
inspire. . . .
Wild easily transcends the hiking genre,
though it presents plenty of details about equipment ordeals and
physical challenges. Anyone with some backpacking experience will
find Strayed''s chronicle especially amusing. Her boots prove too
small. The trail destroys her feet. Then there is the possibility
of real mortality: She repeatedly finds herself just barely
avoiding rattlesnakes. Strayed is honest about the tedium of hiking
but also alert to the self-discovery that can be stirred by
solitude and self-reliance. . . . Pathos and humor are her main
companions on the trail, although she writes vividly about the cast
of other pilgrims she encounters. Finding out 'what it was like to
walk for miles,' Strayed writes, was 'a powerful and fundamental
experience.' And knowing that feeling has a way of taming the
challenges thrown up by modern life." -Michael J. Ybarra,
The
Wall Street Journal
"Strayed's journey is the focal point of
Wild, in which
she interweaves suspenseful accounts of her most harrowing crises
with imagistic moments of reflection. Her profound grief over her
mother's death, her emotional abandonment by her siblings and
stepfather, and her personal shortcomings and misadventures are all
conveyed with a consistently grounded, quietly pained
self-awareness. On the trail, she fends of everything from
loneliness to black bears; we groan when her boots go tumbling off
a cliff and we rejoice as she transforms from a terrified amateur
hiker into the 'Queen of the PCT.' In a style that embodies her
wanderlust, Strayed transports us with this gripping, ultimately
uplifting tale." -Catherine Straut,
ELLE
"Spectacular.
Wild is at once a breathtaking adventure
tale and a profound meditation on the nature of grief and survival.
. . . . Strayed's load is both literal and metaphorical-so heavy
that she staggers beneath its weight. . . . Often when narratives
are structured in parallel arcs, the two stories compete and one
dominates. But in
Wild, the two tales Strayed tells, of
her difficult past and challenging present, are delivered in
perfect balance. Not only am I not an adventurer myself, but I am
not typically a reader of wilderness stories. Yet I was riveted
step by precarious step through Strayed's encounters with bears,
rattlesnakes, mountain lion scat, ice, record snow and predatory
men. She lost six toenails, suffered countless bruises and scabs,
improvised bootees made of socks wrapped in duct tape, woke up one
time covered in frogs, and met strangers who were extraordinarily
kind to her. Perhaps her adventure is so gripping because Strayed
relates its gritty, visceral details not out of a desire to milk
its obviously dramatic circumstances, but out of a powerful, yet
understated, imperative to understand its meaning. We come to feel
how her actions and her internal struggles intertwine, and
appreciate the lessons she finds embedded in the natural world. . .
. Strayed is a clearheaded, scarred, human, powerful and enormously
talented writer who is secure enough to confess she does not have
all the answers. . .
Wild isn't a concept-generated book,
that is, one of those great projects that began as a good, salable
idea. Rather, it started out as an experience that was lived,
digested and deeply understood. Only then was it fashioned into a
book-one that is both a literary and human triumph." -Dani Shapiro,
The New York Times Book Review
"What should you do when you have truly lost your way? A. Go to
rehab. B. Find God. C. Give up. D. Strap on an 80-pound backpack
and hike 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail by yourself. Few of
us who would even come up with D, much less do it. Yet that is
exactly what Strayed did at age 26, though she had no serious
experience backpacking or hiking. Within days of beginning her
trek-already bruised, bloodied and broke-it occurred to her that
this whimsical choice was the hardest thing she''d ever done. . . .
What she does have is brute persistence, sheer will and moxie, and
her belief that there is only one option: 'To keep walking.' . . .
In her journey from the most hapless hiker on Earth to the Queen of
the PCT, Strayed offers not just practical and spiritual wisdom,
but a blast of sheer, ferocious moral inspiration." -Marion
Winik,
Newsday
"When a book has this kind of velocity, when a narrative is
enriched by the authority and raw power of a voice like Strayed's,
it barely needs a plot to pull the reader into its vortex. But this
first memoir by the author of the well-received novel
Torch does indeed have a tightly loaded trajectory.
Wild is a poetically told tale of devastation and
redemption that begins with the death of Strayed's mother when
Strayed was 22, and ends four years later, after she writes herself
an unusual prescription in hopes of saving her own life. . . .
Although
Wild is the story of an exceptional young woman
who takes exceptional measures to ease an exceptional amount of
pain, the universality of Strayed's emotions, paired with the
searing intimacy of her prose, convince us that she's more like
than unlike us, and that she did something most of us would never
do, but for reasons we can all understand. . . . And so we relate
to her and root for her as she walks, through searing heat and
trail-blurring snow, wearing boots that don't fit, with inadequate
supplies of money, food, water and experience, escaping the
clutches of scary wildlife and scary men along the way. For three
months. Alone. She keeps going even when her feet are shredded and
her water runs out and an unseasonal blizzard blocks her way.
Reading a travelogue of a long hike could be as thrilling as
watching a faucet drip. But Strayed is a formidable talent, a woman
in full control of her emotions, her soul, and her literary gift,
and in
Wild she's parlayed her heartache and her blisters
into an addictive, gorgeous book that not only entertains, but
leaves us the better for having read it." -Meredith Maran,
The Boston Globe
"[
Wild] is really two books in one. Initially it's a story
of grief and a chronicle of the loss of her mother, her marriage,
even the loss of her last name. . . . And in this way,
Wild is much more than a book about grief and loss. [But]
it's also about change and transformation, an adventure story full
of hope, friendship, and second chances at life. From all
appearances, this is a woman who has found her place in the world,
both on the home front and in literary circles, where the buzz
about her new memoir has steadily grown into a roar." -Leslie
Schwartz,
Poets & Writers
"A long-distance hike through the wilds of the West is a perfect
metaphor for someone seeking to draw a new line from past to
future, and it''s with such self-awareness that Strayed sets
out-with woeful preparation-to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from
the Mojave Desert to the California-Oregon border. The journey''s
purpose is to correct the trajectory of her life and lead her to a
better version of herself. Flashbacks to her childhood in northern
Minnesota, to the collapse of her marriage, and, most of all, to
her mother''s death and the subsequent dissolution of her family,
give us a troubled and complex figure whose lostness is palpable. .
. . It''s a fearless story, told in honest prose that is wildly
lyrical as often as it is physical." -Scott Parker,
The
Minneapolis Star Tribune
"We readers love memoirs for the most selfish of reasons: As we
encounter the writer''s decisions, collisions, the chances taken or
missed, some part of our brain is simultaneously revisiting the
things in our own lives that got us this far. Strayed''s
Wild is one of the best examples of this phenomenon to
come along since
Poser by Clare Dederer last year and
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott''s classic. . . . Anyone who has
read a lot of this genre in recent years can''t help but brace
herself for the sordid details of a downward spiral. Strayed,
however, takes to a different trail. The Pacific Crest Trail, to be
precise. . . .
Wild will appeal to readers who dream of
making such a hike, and Strayed''s descriptions of the landscape
will not disappoint. They are as frank and original as the rest of
the book . . . This isn''t Cinderella in hiking boots, it''s a
woman coming out of heartbreak, darkness and bad decisions with a
clear view of where she has been. She isn''t inoculated against all
future heartbreak, but she suspects she can make it through what
comes next.
Wild could slide neatly into predictability,
but it doesn''t. There are adventures and characters aplenty, from
heartwarming to dangerous, but Strayed resists the temptation to
overplay or sweeten such moments. Her pacing is impeccable as she
captures her impressive journey. She deftly revisits the mix of
bravado and introspection inside the head of a wounded young woman.
Her honesty never flags." -Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett,
The
Seattle Times
"Brave and beautiful." -Antonia Crane,
ZYZZYVA
"In
Wild, Strayed recounts the road to redemption-a road
buried in snow, crawling with rattlers, and patrolled by bears-with
humor and irrefutably hard-won wisdom." -Elissa Schappell,
Vanity Fair
"
Wild seamlessly intercuts Strayed's occasionally
harrowing adventures on the PCT-from bear sightings to the hot
bartender she picks up in a trailside town-with recollections of
her childhood and family, as well as postcard panoramas of the
deserts, forests, and snowfields she traverses.
Wild is a
memoir that's light on epiphany, but heavy on the importance of
keeping moving-even when it's hard. Even when your toenails keep
falling off. . . . beautifully told." -Alison Hallett,
Portland
Mercury
"How long is the journey to happiness? For Strayed, it was 1,100
miles. . . . Layered between tales of the trail are painful yet
beautiful remembrances of the experiences that led her there: the
heart-wrenching days spent at her dying mother's bedside; the
sadness and guilt she carried about her subsequent unraveling,
which led to a divorce; and the attempts she made to escape these
emotions through drugs, alcohol and men. . . . Though it's easy to
get lost among the cacophony of voices competing for attention in
today's memoir market,
Wild rises above the clatter.
Strayed is a brilliant storyteller with an extraordinary gift not
only for language but also for sharing the wisdom she earned with
each and every step. Spectacular." -Kim Schmidt,
American
Way
"After her mother died and her marriage fell apart, novelist
Strayed impulsively decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, from
the Mexican border to just below Canada, in a desperate attempt to
regain her footing. With no hiking experience, too-small boots and
a too-large backpack (she dubs it Monster), she soloed for three
months, encountering rattlers and battling her terror of bears and
mountain lions by singing 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.' Strayed
persevered through punishing loneliness, coping by digging deeper
into her own psyche. . . . With grace, wild humor and transcendent
insights, she describes her dawning awareness that hiking was
making the pain in her life 'the tiniest bit less hard,' and as she
begins to heal, she also discovers just how strong she really is.
Strayed's language is so vivid, sharp and compelling that you feel
the heat of the desert, the frigid ice of the High Sierra and the
breathtaking power of one remarkable woman finding her way-and
herself-one brave step at a time. Four stars." -Caroline
Leavitt,
People
"[A] poignant, no-holds barred, kick-ass memoir that will grab you
by the throat and shake you to your core. . . . Strayed seamlessly
weaves events on the trail with memories, good and bad, that
explain why this hike had to be. And so it goes, for 1,100 miles
and three arduous months-through injuries, hunger, thirst,
strangers met, kindnesses shown, ice and snow, some hilarity, much
suffering, almost quitting and much learning. . . . this powerful
and raw, deeply felt, often humorous, and beautifully written
memoir turns hiking into an act of redemption and salvation."
-
Shelf Awareness
"Strayed has enjoyed acclaim as an extraordinary essayist for 15
years. . . .
Wild tells how, when she was 22 with her life
in disarray, she impulsively decided to hike the Pacific Crest
Trail alone, from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon.
The idea was that it might help her put things back together. Like
the Adrienne Rich poem 'Power' that bolsters Strayed after the
trail nearly breaks her on her first day out, Strayed has power in
reserve. It used to take her younger self by surprise-like so many
of her encounters and revelations along the trail. Strayed
reclaimed herself with she claimed that power on the Pacific Crest
Trail. Today, she owns it, and she knows how to use it. We're
feeling it now." -Brian Juenemann,
The
Register-Guard
"Ardent. . . it is voice-fierce, billowing with energy,
precise-that carries
Wild. By turns both devastating and
glorious, Strayed uses it to narrate her progress and setbacks on
the trail and within herself, occasionally flashing back to fill in
the events that brought her to this desperate traverse. . . . By
laying bare a great unspoken truth of adulthood-that many things in
life don't turn out the way you want them to, and that you can and
must live through them anyway-
Wild feels real in ways that
many books about 'finding oneself' do not. The hike, rewarding
though it is, doesn't heal Strayed. . . . Strayed waited close to
20 years to publish her story, and it shows. Though many of the
things that happen to her are extreme-at one point she hikes in
boots made entirely of duct tape-she never writes from a place of
desperation in the kind of semi-edited purge state that has marred
so many true stories in recent years. Such fine control over so
many unfathomable, enormous experiences was no doubt hard-won. When
she finally reaches her destination, she's completed her
hike, but her mother is still dead, her marriage is still over, her
family and home still lost forever. She spends $1.80 of her last $2
on an ice cream cone. The ice cream is wonderful, but it's not the
answer to anything, and she knows it. . . . Strayed is someone you
want to listen to as she walks on. What she offers up are many,
many new questions far more valuable than any platitudes about
self-discovery, and it's in these that the heart of her story
lies." -Melanie Rehak,
Slate
"Cheryl Strayed was a novice hiker when she decided to embark on a
solo trek along the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), a scenic footpath
that zigzags over the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountains for 2,650
miles between Mexico and Canada. Her poetic memoir
Wild
opens with the impetus for her journey: the sudden death of her
mother just 49 days after being diagnosed with lung cancer.
Despondent an disoriented in the wake of her loss, Strayed
self-destructs. . . . Not sure what she is in search of, she sets
off for the PCT with a guidebook, a collection of poems and an ice
ax she doesn't yet know how to use. During the harrowing
three-month journey that ensues, she starts to make sense of her
loss . . . In this compelling chronicle, she does just that,
meeting kindhearted fellow travelers along the way as well as two
terrifying hunters, several rattlesnakes, a bull and, in the end,
someone she can finally begin to admire: herself." -Liz
Welch,
More
"Raw, heartbreaking, humorous, 'Wild' is an apt title in many
ways-evoking not just the pristine rugged-ness of [Strayed's]
1,100-mile hike from the Mojave Desert in California to the
Columbia River on Oregon's northern edge, but also the untamed
emotional landscape that Strayed is desperately trying to escape.
In flashbacks along the trail, she relives the jagged memories she
is fighting to outrun: abuse, adultery, and the death of her
mother-a loss that left her so grief-stricken she once broke down
and ate her mother's cremated remains. . . . If the emotional
baggage isn't enough, there is the actual bag Strayed struggles to
carry: a ridiculously enormous backpack so overloaded with
nonessentials she dubs it 'Monster' and can hoist it only by
finding ways to get her legs underneath it. Such bursts of levity
come just often enough to blunt
Wild's darkest moments.
Wild succeeds in reminding us that there's always
something to be learned from anyone who, however lost, keeps
putting one foot in front of the other." -Brian Barker,
Portland Monthly Magazine
"Strayed recounts her experience hiking the PCT after her mother's
death and her own subsequent divorce. . . . She takes readers with
her on the trail, and the transformation she experiences on its
course is significant: she goes from feeling out of her element
with a too-big backpack and too-small boots to finding a sense of
home in the wilderness and with the allies she meets along the way.
Readers will appreciate her vivid descriptions of the natural
wonders." -Karen McCoy,
Library Journal
"Shattered by the death of her mother and the breakup of her
marriage in her mid-twenties, Strayed attempted to hike 1,000 miles
of the Pacific Crest Trail alone as a way to piece herself back
together after so much loss. . . . The portrait of her mother, a
free spirit once married to an abusive man, is heartbreaking. As
are her accounts of the extraordinary bonds that sprung up among
hikers sharing provisions and offering help." -
Whole
Living
"At 26, Cheryl Strayed realized she was lost. Divorced, still
reeling from the sudden death of her mother, she made the radical
decision to hike 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail-from the
Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington state-by
herself. Her account of that journey is one of the most thrilling
memoirs in years. Why is
Wild such a standout? For
starters, there's the tale's sheer ballsiness: Strayed was an
inexperienced hiker when she set out alone, unsure of how to read a
compass. When she lost her boots, she wrapped duct tape
around her feet and kept hiking. It's fascinating to imagine
Strayed taking on black bears and rattlesnakes and impassable
snowfall (to say nothing of sexy, dark-haired guitar players and
lecherous rednecks with knives). But more impressive is Strayed's
writing.
Wild will undoubtedly be compared to Krakauer's
Into the Wild, but unlike its tragic cousin,
Wild
is not about an idealistic young person trying to escape the world.
It's about an idealistic young person learning to live within in.
Reading
Wild, you think: Here is a woman speaking in her
own voice about trying to heal her soul-by getting her ass kicked
in the woods. . . Clear, honest, and quietly
riveting." -Kimberly Cutter,
Marie Claire
"After the untimely death of her beloved mother from cancer, Cheryl
Strayed, 22 at the time, was left with an all-encompassing grief
and a disintegrating marriage. Directionless and searching, an
impromptu decision set her compass north. North from the Mojave
Desert through California, north across Oregon, and north still
through Washington state across the vast, beautiful, and
unforgiving stretches of the Pacific Crest Trail. Having never gone
backpacking before, Strayed embarked on an 1,100-mile, three-month
solo hike that tested both her physical and mental endurance, and
ultimately restored her sense of self. A deeply honest memoir about
mother and daughter, solitude and courage, and regaining footing
one step at a time." -Antonina Jedrzejczak,
Vogue
"Cheryl Strayed's memoir,
Wild, proves she's fearless: in
life and in her writing. . . . This book isn't just a travel
memoir: it's a no-holds-barred account of what inspired a novice
hiker to undertake such a grueling journey in the first place.
Using the chronological framework of the trek to examine her life
up to that point (she was 26), Strayed explores the aftermath of
her 45-year-old mother's death from cancer four years earlier.
Writing takes one 'into all the dark places,' Strayed says,
describing the evolution of
Wild as starting out as a
personal essay for a planned collection that expanded into a memoir
because she finally felt that she had to tell the whole story of
the hike, including its backstory. Searing . . . powerful . . .
mesmerizing." -Claire Kirch,
Publishers Weekly
"Gripping." -
Esquire
"Echoing the ever popular search for wilderness salvation by Chris
McCandless and other modern-day disciple[s] of Thoreau, Strayed
tells the story of her emotional devastation after the death of her
mother and the seeks she spent hiking the 1,100-mile Pacific Crest
Trail. . . . Woefully unprepared (she fails to read about the
trail, buys boots that fit, or pack practically), she relies on the
kindess and assistance of those she meets along the way . . .
Clinging to the books she lugs along-Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor,
Adrienne Rich-Strayed labors along the demanding trail, documenting
her bruises, blisters, and greater troubles. Hiker wannabes will
likely be inspired. . . . This chronicle, perfect for book clubs,
is certain to spark lively conversation." -Colleen Mondor,
Booklist
"In the summer of 1995, at age 26 and feeling at the end of her
rope emotionally, Strayed resolved to hike solo the Pacific Crest
Trail . . . In this detailed, in-the-moment re-enactment, she
delineates the travails and triumphs of those three grueling
months. Living in Minneapolis, on the verge of divorcing her
husband, Strayed was still reeling from the sudden death four years
before of her mother; the ensuing years formed an erratic, confused
time 'like a crackling Fourth of July sparkler.' Hiking the trail
helped decide what direction her life would take, even though she
had never seriously hiked or carried a pack before. . . .
Eventually she began to experience 'a kind of strange, abstract,
retrospective fun,' meeting the few other hikers along the way, all
male; jettisoning some of the weight from her pack and burning
books she had read; and encountering all manner of creature and
acts of nature, from rock slides to snow. Her account forms a
charming, intrepid trial by fire, as she emerges from the ordeal
bruised but not beaten, changed, a lone survivor." -
Publishers
Weekly (starred review)
"Unsentimental memoir of the author's solo hike from California to
Washington along the Pacific Crest Trail. Following the death of
her mother, Strayed's life quickly disintegrated. . . . While
waiting in line at an outdoors store, [she] read the back cover of
a book about the Pacific Crest Trail. Initially, the idea of hiking
the trail became a vague apparition, then a goal. Woefully
underprepared for the wilderness, out of shape and carrying a
ridiculously overweight pack, the author set out from the small
California town of Mojave, toward a bridge ('the Bridge of the
Gods') crossing the Columbia River at the Oregon-Washington border.
Strayed's writing admirably conveys the rigors and rewards of
long-distance hiking. Along the way she suffered aches, pains,
loneliness, blistered, bloody feet and persistent hunger. Yet the
author also discovered a newfound sense of awe . . . stunned by how
the trail both shattered and sheltered her. Most of the hikers she
met along the way were helpful, and she also encountered instances
of trail magic . . . A candid, inspiring narrative of the author's
brutal physical and psychological journey through a wilderness of
despair to a renewed sense of self." -
Kirkus
Reviews (starred review)
"No one can write like Cheryl Strayed.
Wild is one of the
most unflinching and emotionally honest books I''ve read in a long
time. It is about forgiveness and grief, bravery and hope. It is
unforgettable." -Ann Hood, author of
The Knitting
Circle
"While reading Cheryl Strayed's stunning book about her arduous
solo journey along the Pacific Crest Trail, I kept asking
myself-what would I do if I were stripped bare of everything-money,
job, community, even family and love? Thoreau once said, 'In
wildness is the preservation of the world.' For Strayed, it is
clear that in wildness was the preservation of her soul. She
reminds us, in her lyrical and courageous memoir
Wild, of
what it means to be fully alive, even in the face of catastrophe,
physical and psychic hardship, and loss." -Mira Bartók, author
of
The Memory Palace
"Cheryl Strayed can sure tell a story. In
Wild,
she describes her journey from despair to transcendence
with honesty, humor, and heart-cracking poignancy. This is a great
book." -Mary Pipher, author of
Reviving Ophelia and
Seeking Peace
"A courageous and transforming journey-spirit and body." -Ursula
Hegi, author of
Stones from the River
"Arresting . . . So many heal-myself memoirs are available that
initially I hesitated about [
Wild]. Then I considered the
source: Cheryl Strayed, the author of a lyric yet
tough-minded first novel [called]
Torch-a Great Lakes
Book Award finalist . . .
Wild [is] Strayed''s
account of her 1,100-mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail,
from the Mojave Desert to Washington State. Shattered at 26 by her
mother's death, her family's fragmenting, and the end of her
marriage, Strayed upped and decided to do something way out of the
realm of her experience; here she confronts snowstorms and
rattlesnakes even as she confronts her personal pain. Wish I had
her guts!" -Barbara Hoffert,
LibraryJournal.com
"This is a big, brave,
break-your-heart-and-put-it-back-together-again kind of
book. Cheryl Strayed is a courageous, gritty, and
deceptively elegant writer. She walked the PCT to find
forgiveness, came back with generosity-and now she shares her
reward with us. I snorted with laughter, I wept
uncontrollably; I don't even want to
know the
person who isn't going to love
Wild. This is a
beautifully made, utterly realized book." -Pam Houston, author
of
Contents May Have Shifted
and
Cowboys Are My Weakness
"Spectacular!" -Elizabeth McCracken, author of
The
Giant's House
"Cheryl Strayed is one of the most exciting writers I've come
across in a long time." -Hope Edelman, author of
Motherless
Daughters
"Smart, funny, and often sublime,
Wild has something for
everyone-a fight for survival in the wilderness, a bad girl's quest
for redemption-all in the hands of a brilliant and evocative
writer." -Chelsea Cain, author of
Heartsick
"Stunning . . . An incredible journey, both inward and outward."
-Garth Stein, author of
The Art of Racing in the
Rain
1. "The Pacific Crest Trail wasn't a world to me then. It was an
idea, vague and outlandish, full of promise and mystery. Something
bloomed inside me as I traced its jagged line with my finger on a
map" (p. 4). Why did the PCT capture Strayed's imagination at that
point in her life?
2. Each section of the book opens with a literary quote or two.
What do they tell you about what's to come in the pages that
follow? How does Strayed's pairing of, say, Adrienne Rich and Joni
Mitchell (p. 45) provide insight into her way of thinking?
3. Strayed is quite forthright in her description of her own
transgressions, and while she's remorseful, she never seems
ashamed. Is this a sign of strength or a character flaw?
4. "I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was
doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell
ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the
one women are told" (p. 51). Fear is a major theme in the book. Do
you think Strayed was too afraid, or not afraid enough? When were
you most afraid for her?
5. Strayed chose her own last name: "Nothing fit until one day
when the word strayed came into my mind. Immediately, I
looked it up in the dictionary and knew it was mine . . . : to
wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to
be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be
without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to
diverge or digress" (p. 96). Did she choose well? What did you
think when you learned she had assigned this word to herself-that
it was no coincidence?
6. On the trail, Strayed encounters mostly men. How does this
work in her favor? What role does gender play when removed from the
usual structure of society?
7. What does the reader learn from the horrific episode in which
Strayed and her brother put down their mother's horse?
8. Strayed writes that the point of the PCT "had only to do with
how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for
miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees
and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and
grasses, sunrises and sunsets" (p. 207). How does this sensation
help Strayed to find her way back into the world beyond the
wilderness?
9. On her journey, Strayed carries several totems. What does the
black feather mean to her? And the POW bracelet? Why does she find
its loss (p. 238) symbolic?
10. Does the hike help Strayed to get over Paul? If so, how? And
if not, why?
11. Strayed says her mother's death "had obliterated me. . . . I
was trapped by her but utterly alone. She would always be the empty
bowl that no one could fill" (p 267). How did being on the PCT on
her mother's fiftieth birthday help Strayed to heal this wound?
12. What was it about Strayed that inspired the generosity of so
many strangers on the PCT?
13. "There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not
another. . . . But I was pretty certain as I sat there that night
that if it hadn't been for Eddie, I wouldn't have found myself on
the PCT" (p. 304). How does this realization change Strayed's
attitude towards her stepfather?
14. To lighten her load, Strayed burns each book as she reads
it. Why doesn't she burn the Adrienne Rich collection?
15. What role do books and reading play in this often solitary
journey?
A powerful, blazingly honest, inspiring memoir: the story of a 1,100 mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe--and built her back up again.
