Talk to Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Wild is Cheryl Strayed's account of hiking 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail alone in 1995 at twenty-six, with no prior backpacking experience and a pack so heavy she could barely lift it. She did it in the aftermath of her mother's death from cancer, a heroin habit she'd stumbled into, and the end of her marriage. The hike was not planned as a spiritual journey. It was an act of desperation, a way to stop falling apart by forcing herself to walk.
The book alternates between the trail — blisters, wrong gear, rattlesnakes, desert heat, snowpack in the Sierra Nevada — and the history that brought her there. Her mother, Bobbi, is the emotional center of the book. Strayed describes her as the kind of woman who chose joy loudly and unconventionally, who grew up poor and died at forty-five having only recently begun the life she wanted. The loss unraveled Strayed completely. She charts the specific ways grief and self-destruction intertwined: the heroin, the sex with strangers, the inability to hold anything together. The PCT was her attempt at something different.
What it gets right
- 1.
Grief does not follow a schedule or a process. Strayed's unraveling after her mother's death — the heroin, the failed marriage, the recklessness — is a portrait of what unsupported grief can look like in a real life.
- 2.
Physical endurance can create psychological room. The demands of the trail did not resolve Strayed's pain, but they displaced the recursive thinking that was consuming her.
- 3.
Radical inexperience is sometimes an advantage. Strayed didn't know enough to talk herself out of the hike. Starting ignorant forced her to adapt rather than plan.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Cheryl Strayed is an American author and essayist born in 1968. Wild, her first memoir, became a number-one New York Times bestseller and was adapted into a 2014 film starring Reese Witherspoon. She is also the author of the novel Torch and the essay collection Tiny Beautiful Things, drawn from her years writing the Dear Sugar advice column anonymously for The Rumpus. Strayed has taught writing at the University of Portland and lives in Portland, Oregon. Wild remains the book most closely associated with her, though her advice writing built a devoted following independently of it.
