Cheryl Strayed is the author of Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on
Love and Life from Dear Sugar and the novel Torch. Her stories and
essays have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including
The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Vogue,
The Rumpus, Self, The Missouri Review, The Sun, and The Best
American Essays. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
www.cherylstrayed.com
One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, The Boston Globe,
Entertainment Weekly, Vogue
“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
Grieving for her recently deceased mother and a failed marriage, Strayed slipped into heroin addiction and a destructive lifestyle before deciding on a whim to hike the grueling Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) at age 26. Part memoir and part adventure story, Strayed's chronicle of her 1100-mile hike describes her suffering through blisters and bruises, threats from rattlesnakes, extreme thirst, bears, a predatory hunter, and intense loneliness, all while carrying her huge pack nicknamed "Monster." Strayed (Torch) writes with startling and heartbreaking clarity as she relates her mother's sad death at 45 as well as the physical and psychological transformation she underwent while on the trail. Bernadette Dunne's versatile narration can make even the male characters sound realistic. -VERDICT This audiobook will appeal to memoir fans and to those interested in physical challenges as an antidote to emotional pain. ["This book is less about the PCT and more about Strayed's own personal journey, which makes the story's scope a bit unclear. However, fans of her novel will likely enjoy this new book," read the review of the Knopf hc, LJ 2/15/12.-Ed.]-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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