Wild by Cheryl Strayed (Reviews)(quoted)

[Andy]

Wild : A Journey from Lost to Found by Cheryl Strayed (Reviews)

ABOUT THIS BOOK

(http://www.randomhouse.com)

“Cheryl Strayed 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

“Stunning . . . An incredible journey, both inward and outward.” —Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain

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.

Wild : A Journey from Lost to Found by Cheryl Strayed (review)

by Sara Wheeler

The Observer, Sunday 6 January 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

In this hugely entertaining book, Cheryl Strayed takes the redemptive nature of travel – a theme as old as literature itself – and makes it her own. For three months she hiked 1,100 miles alone along the Pacific Crest Trail, a continuous wilderness undulating from Mexico to Canada over nine mountain ranges – the Laguna to the Cascades. She did it, she says, "in order to save myself".

An American raised in rural Minnesota, Strayed lost her beloved mother when she was 22. An abusive father had long ago vanished, and in the wake of their bereavement, Strayed's siblings and stepfather scattered and her marriage to a rather wonderful man collapsed as a result of her serial infidelities ("I'd smashed up my marriage over sex"). She was waitressing, servicing a student debt for a degree she failed to complete (she reckoned she would pay off the debt when she was 43), and then came Planet Heroin. In the wake of her divorce, she invented a new name for herself: Strayed. Because she had strayed. Four years after her mother's death, still "unmoored by sorrow", she packed a rucksack and flew to California. "Hiking the PCT," she writes, "was my way back to the person I used to be."

On her epic trek, this novice hiker faced temperatures of 100 degrees in the shade on the Modoc plateau and record snowfalls in the high sierras, not to mention bears, rattlesnakes and failed waterholes. The terrain was rarely easy: "Sometimes," writes Strayed, "it seemed that the Pacific Crest Trail was one long mountain I was ascending." Her boots died (she had already lost most of her toenails) and she made "duct-tape bootees" out of a pair of sandals while waiting for fresh boots to arrive in the middle of nowhere in a courier's box. When a branch snapped in the night outside her lonely tent, she made herself say out loud, "I am not afraid." For weeks she does not wash or wear knickers and, as a result, a shower at a lonely campsite turns into "an almost holy experience". The seasons change, and so does the landscape, but these pages contain little in the way of topographical description. It is the inner landscape that captures this unusual author.

The story of her past, and in particular her mother's harrowing death, unspools as a counter-narrative alongside the blisters and the bulky backpack she calls Monster. (The mother, clearly an extraordinary and inspiring figure, looms over this book like a ghost.) Wild follows Strayed's painful first steps as she averaged nine miles a day and learned how to use her gear (or didn't), to the happy weeks when her muscles were like ropes and she was lean, bronzed and hairy-legged. At staging posts on the trail – not towns but straggly outposts of civilisation – she picked up resupply boxes she had mailed to herself. Each contained $20, along with books, freeze-dried food and a clean T-shirt (she packed lacy underwear in the last box). At one point she describes herself as "hot, angry, sick of myself". I recognised that. How very sick of oneself one gets on the road.

Mostly, Strayed saw no one, but she is good on the peculiar intimacy one strikes up on chance encounters in strange parts, and the camaraderie on the trail, when freeze-dried noodles, Elastoplast and news of fresh snowfalls are exchanged in long nights around the camp fire. I enjoyed those passages immensely. Similarly, she writes well about the relationship one has with books when alone and travelling, though I was inevitably influenced in her favour by the fact that her writers are mine, notably Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. The latter would have admired Cheryl Strayed. In the evenings, after making camp, she sat with a pot of noodles gripped between her knees, spooning food in one hand and holding a book in the other, reading by the light of her miner's headlamp as the sky darkened. "I grew stronger," she writes as the weeks unfold. In short, she read herself out of a hole. And what are books for, if not that?

Wild tracks the physical changes as a body gets turned inside out in three months, and more interestingly, the prose reveals Strayed's return to sanity. Body image is a component of this last transformation. The author refers at several points to issues with weight that dogged her past, and to her confused attitude to her own physical appearance. At one point, at a PCT campsite, she sees herself in a cracked mirror for the first time in many weeks, and ends up "wondering whether I was a babe or a gargoyle". Many women will recognise that particular experience, and might take heart from the resolution Strayed finds in the course of her trip.

Sex is a leitmotif: Strayed likes it, and had packed condoms. Men are sized up as soon as they walk into the campsite and on to the page. About two-thirds of the way through the book, congress finally occurs, spreadeagled against a boulder on a beach, with honey and sand involved. Sex is one of the last taboos in women's travel writing, and I have noticed that male reviewers tend not to like it. They know, I hope, where they can stick their dislike, and well done Cheryl Strayed.

Despite the Wagnerian tempests that led to the journey, a quiet dignity inhabits the heart of this book, as Strayed takes on the Mojave desert and the wind-twisted foxtail pines at the foot of Mount Washington. There are longueurs in the story and stylistic infelicities in the prose. But she lobs in lots of yeasty direct speech to keep the book, like the journey, on the road. I can't wait for the film.

Strayed is 44 now: one senses that it has taken her this long to understand the true meaning of the journey – or perhaps she had to wait for certain people to die. At any rate, she is happily married with two children, her demons at bay, and her book, a New York Times bestseller, was taken up by Oprah (you can watch a Strayed slideshow on the Oprah website). Towards the end of Wild, approaching journey's end at the Bridge of the Gods over the benighted Columbia River, the author writes: "I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in the world now." Lucky her.

The High Road

‘Wild,’ a Hiking Memoir by Cheryl Strayed

By DANI SHAPIRO

In the summer of 1995, a 26-year-old woman who had never been backpacking before set out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. She had already separated from her husband, quit her waitressing job and sold most of her belongings. Now she went to the outdoors store REI to purchase almost everything she could possibly think of for her three-month journey: fleece pants and an anorak, a thermal shirt, two pairs of wool socks and underwear, a sleeping bag, a camp chair, a head lamp, five bungee cords, a water purifier, a tiny collapsible stove, a canister of gas and a small pink lighter, two cooking pots, utensils, a thermometer, a tarp, a snakebite kit, a Swiss Army knife, binoculars, a compass, a book called “Staying Found” to teach herself how to use the compass, a first-aid kit, toiletries, a menstrual sponge, a lantern, water bottles, iodine pills, a foldable saw (“for what, I did not know”), two pens and three books in addition to “Staying Found”: “The Pacific Crest Trail, Vol. 1: California,” William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and Adrienne Rich’s “Dream of a Common Language.” She also bought a 200-page sketchbook to use as a journal.

People with any hiking experience (I am not one) will know that this is the backpack of a rank amateur, that setting out on a 1,100-mile trek from the Mojave Desert to the Cascades outfitted in brand-new hiking boots — a size too small, it turned out — and with 24.5 pounds of water in a dromedary bag is a recipe for disaster. Fortunately for the reader, it’s also a recipe for a spectacular book. “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail” is at once a breathtaking adventure tale and a profound meditation on the nature of grief and survival.

To begin to understand something about Cheryl Strayed, know that Strayed is not her given name. We never find out the name she was born with, but we are made to understand with absolute clarity why she chose to change it, and just how well her new name suits her. Contemplating divorce, she realized that she couldn’t continue to use the hyphenated married name she’d shared with her husband, “nor could I go back to having the name I had had in high school and be the girl I used to be. . . . I pondered the question of my last name, mentally scanning words that sounded good with Cheryl. . . . 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. Its layered definitions spoke directly to my life and also struck a poetic chord: 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. I had diverged, digressed, wandered and become wild. . . . I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild ­places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn’t have known before.”

Cheryl Strayed’s load is both literal and metaphorical — so heavy that she staggers beneath its weight. Her mother has died (lung cancer, age 45); her father is long gone (“a liar and a charmer, a heartbreak and a brute”). In what is for her a stunning act of filial betrayal, her brother and sister find it too painful to come to the hospital as Strayed’s mother is fading, leaving her, then 22, to prop up the pillows so that her mother could die, as had been her wish, sitting up. Strayed’s stepfather, whom she had loved, disengaged himself from the family and quickly found new love, unwilling even to take care of his late wife’s beloved mare, who became so enfeebled that — in one of the book’s most harrowing scenes — Strayed and her brother are forced to put her down. They do this the old-fashioned way, by shooting her between the eyes. Beside herself with grief, Strayed abandons her kind and loving husband, gets involved with a heroin addict and becomes an addict herself. Just before leaving for the Pacific trail, even after six months off drugs, she shoots up once more, “the little bruise on my ankle that I’d gotten from shooting heroin in Portland” now “faded to a faint morose yellow.” Beneath her wool socks and too-small hiking boots, that bruise was a continuing reminder of her “own ludicrousness.”

Often when narratives are structured in parallel arcs, the two stories compete and one dominates. The reader skims the less-favored one, eager to get back to the other. 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. In a brief meditation on mountains, for example, she writes: “They were, I now realized, layered and complex, inexplicable and analogous to nothing. Each time I reached the place that I thought was the top . . . there was still more up to go. . . . I was entirely in new terrain.” “Wild” isn’t a concept-generated book, that is, one of those 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.

What allows us to survive? To lose and then find ourselves? How do we learn to accept grief instead of permitting it to obliterate us? How can a young woman who describes herself as having a “hole in her heart” (a mother-shaped hole, I thought to myself) transform herself through solitude and high-octane risk and the comforts of literature (along the way she picked up books like “The Complete Stories” of Flannery O’Connor and J. M. Coetzee’s “Waiting for the Barbarians”) into a clearheaded, scarred, human, powerful and enormously talented writer who is secure enough to confess she does not have all the answers? “It was enough,” she tells us as she reaches the poetically named Bridge of the Gods, which connects Oregon to Washington, “to trust that what I’d done was true.”

Perhaps a clue can be found in the words of Strayed’s mother, and the legacy she left her daughter. “‘The first thing I did when each of you was born was kiss every part of you,’ my mother used to say to my siblings and me. ‘I’d count every finger and toe and eyelash,’ she’d say. ‘I’d trace the lines in your hands.’” Strayed writes that “I didn’t remember it, and yet I’d never forgotten it. It was as much a part of me as my father saying he’d throw me out the window. More.”

As Strayed’s mother grew sicker, she would repeat the sentence “I’m with you always” again and again. And, in a way, she was her daughter’s constant companion through it all. In the end, it was this: not the loss, not the abandonment, not the rebellion, but the love itself. The love won out.

Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found

by Cheryl Strayed – review

by Frances Stonor Saunders

The Guardian, Saturday 9 February 2013

In the winter of 1994, while queuing to pay for a shovel in a Minneapolis hardware store, Cheryl Strayed picked up a book called The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California. The PCT, she learned, is a continuous wilderness trail that runs in a jagged 2,000-mile line from the Mexican border in California to a bridge spanning the Columbia River just into Canada. She put the book back on the shelf, and left.

At just 26, Strayed had a lot of shit to shovel. She had lost her mother to cancer, flunked college one paper short of a degree, been divorced from a husband she still loved, and generally thrashed about in the shockwaves of this extended trauma. Drifting from state to state for several years, she was now in Minneapolis where she waited tables and had sex with strangers. She was so far from the idea of herself she had grown up with that she had come, literally, to assume a new identity: when her divorce was finalised, she changed her (undisclosed) surname to Strayed.

Choosing a new name for yourself is both a symbolic gesture and a statement of intent, a strategic investment in the future. Strayed was a shrewd choice; it was clever not to choose Strays, which implies a refusal or inability to change. In a culture that rewards the remodelling of the self, "Strayed" is a canny piece of self-agency – a kind of directed lack of direction in which every signpost points to personal overcoming and a slot on the Oprah Winfrey Book Club.

Armed with a problem of existence and a surname that incorporated it, Strayed returned to the hardware store and bought the guidebook. She worked tables and saved and gradually assembled the necessary equipment and provisions (including condoms) for a solo hike along a section of the Pacific Crest trail that runs through California and Oregon. She packed supply boxes and arranged for a friend to mail them at intervals to post offices near the trail. Finally, seven months on, she took her first steps on the PCT, with the goal of reaching the Bridge of the Gods (redemption being on the agenda), a thousand miles to the north. Her backpack was so heavy she couldn't stand upright. She called it "Monster". Thus encumbered with a burden that could not be borne – she had become her own ugly baggage – she stumbled awkwardly on to the path of self-discovery.

What follows is a thoroughly artless transcription of personal history, a kind of anti-Kerouac memoir where the heat of immediacy is sacrificed, maddeningly, to the cooler demands of meaningfulness. A bear appears on the trail, runs off when Strayed blows her emergency whistle, but in which direction, ahead of her or behind? Cue existential sweat about walking the line (as in, you know, life), facing your fears, advancing rather than retreating. The bear is significant. For her. It exists, like everything else in what might otherwise have been a striking landscape, only as a subdivision of her own concerns. A fox looks at her. She whispers to it, "Fox". He ambles off, she calls gently, ruefully, "Come back," and when he doesn't she shouts "MOM! MOM! MOM!" The fox can't just be a fox, he has to be transformed into an integer of loss, a piece of mental taxidermy.

Long distance walking requires a kind of rhythm, and so does writing about it. Strayed has a tin ear for this, and keeps missing the beat. It is a singular achievement to describe a thousand-mile walk and leave the reader so far behind. She encounters a charging Texas longhorn bull, rattlesnakes, some more bears, she hears the yip-yip of coyotes at night, her toenails fall off because her boots are too tight, she loses one boot so has to walk in plastic sandals held together with gaffer tape, her skin chafes and bleeds under the heft of her pack, she is forced off the trail by record snowfalls, she meets a man and has sex with him, she meets other men and manages not to have sex with them – all this recorded in prose more broken and uneven than any wilderness trail. Oh for the tarmacadam of a single smooth sentence, with no slip roads leading into metaphysical dead-ends like this one: "What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here?" What?

Strayed reached the Bridge of the Gods, in case you were wondering. She found "the me inside of me". She has sold the film rights to Reese Witherspoon, with Nick Hornby, who finds this book to be "brilliantly written", supplying the screenplay. Oprah loves it and has welcomed Strayed to her industrial complex of self-transformation. Nice one Cheryl.