The glories of the wilderness she is walking through receive not much more than an occasional (though appreciative) mention, obviously overshadowed by the dramatic scenery of the memoirist’s inner life. But this book is mostly about the emotional journey – likely why Oprah embraced it with such gushing enthusiasm – with the solitude of the days spent walking allowing for the replaying of life episodes in desperate detail, and their reorganization into the messy story of Strayed’s life, and how she got to where she was. The hiking journal episodes are mildly engaging, for Cheryl Strayed is an acceptable readable writer, and does ironic humour well.

And, quite predictably, she suffers for these blunders, allowing for a sub-theme of how-wrecked-is-my-body to wind through the narrative. This woman has a ton of baggage, and the real-life metaphor of the overloaded backpack is a perfect fit.Ĭompletely unprepared for the magnitude of the hiking aspect of her undertaking, Strayed makes some major neophyte errors: brand-new and too-small boots, way too much equipment, no prior physical conditioning. We get the gritty details of the dirt-poor, country-girl childhood blessed with a totally loving mother and cursed with an abusive birth-father, an affectionate but elusively committed stepfather, two close but eventually unreliable siblings who abandon Cheryl at her mother’s deathbed, a saintly husband who cares desperately for the emotionally damaged Cheryl, episodes of casual sex engaged in while that husband all-unaware meekly tends the home fires, frequent hardcore drug use, brutal self-loathing. Wild is equal parts flashback memoir and hiking journal, emphasis on the flashback portions. In this case, the take-a-hike impulse was engendered by the death of her too-young mother from cancer several years earlier, the self-inflicted ending of her marriage, and an escalating heroin habit. Oprah Winfrey also caught the buzz, and Wild became the newest must-read book, rivalling Elizabeth Gilbert’s earlier Eat, Pray, Love as the “woman power” inspirational tome of the moment.Ĭheryl Strayed’s reason for the trek was not particularly unique: personal trauma calling for a self-challenging healing journey.

Twenty years later writer Cheryl Strayed looked back and turned her trip journal into a book. An advance copy of her book found its way to Hollywood actress Reese Witherspoon, who quickly tied down the filming rights and produced a self-starring movie (see cover of my copy, left) which has subsequently done quite nicely at the box office. In 1995 a young woman set off to solo-hike a 1000-mile portion of the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2663-mile-long wilderness track through the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains, from Mexico to Canada.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed ~ 2012.

Wild cheryl strayed review