Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Cheryl Strayed
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Cheryl Strayed
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Cheryl Strayed’s new memoir...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.' It was a humiliation. To mention all this does Ms. 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.
Yes, [Strayed] has a film deal and yes, Wild has its share of fierce fauna, bad men with knives and extreme physical privation. But what makes her account of a solitary 1,000-mile trek along the Pacific Crest Trail...so special is its serious analysis of what being alone in the wild really means.
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.
Tragic notes that a less skillful writer would draw out — a heroin addiction, an unintended pregnancy and abortion, a string of extramarital affairs — are struck quickly and ruthlessly.
This is both an adventure story and an extended meditation on loss.
Cheryl Strayed's Wildis nothing if not visceral: from the harrowing scene in which she and her brother have to put down a horse, to the state of Strayed's feet when mutilated by too-small boots, her in-your-face narration is completely immersive; a dynamic reading sensation that belies the fact that these events are two decades old.
In the end, the journey does transform Strayed – and a central strength of Wild is that the reader viscerally experiences this transformation along with her. A memoir that is by turns harrowing, lyrical and funny, Wild may benefit from Strayed's distance from the material. Now in her early 40s, she is more often gently wry about her 26-year-old self than emotionally overwrought. Her restraint makes the tragic moments all the more heart-rending.
Wild is Ms. Strayed's vivid, touching and ultimately inspiring account of a life unraveling and of the journey that put it back together.
A profound and moving pilgrimage through the wilderness of grief, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is one of the best American memoirs to emerge in years.
It is this voice—fierce, billowing with energy, precise—that carries Wild.
Wild is an inspirational story—well written, and presented with great courage and depth. But this book is much more than a long walk up and down a trail. It is more than the beauty and danger of nature, the details lovingly remembered and chronicled, transporting us up and down the worn dirt path. And it is more than an ode to a dead mother.
With its vivid descriptions of beautiful but unforgiving terrain, Wild is certainly 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 just buys a cheap ice cream cone and continues down the road. 'When you’re actually out there, taking one step after the other, it’s not romantic,' she says now. Maybe not, though it’s hard to imagine anything more important than taking one boring 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. There was always only one. To keep walking.'.
Unlike the film with Reese Witherspoon, based on Nick Hornby’s script, there are longueurs, but Strayed enlivens her memoir with affectionate descriptions of fellow pilgrims. Little of the style of her eclectic trail reading – Faulkner, Joyce, Adrienne Rich – seeps into her writing, but she is painfully honest and comes to a deep knowledge of the powerful experience of being alone in the wild..
... pivots with unflinching honesty around the author’s loss of her mother to lung cancer when Strayed was 22.
The elevator-pitch for Wild is that it's the story of a young, emotionally messed-up woman who decides to hike the PCT and does so without any substantive hiking knowledge or prior experience. That's the plot. And that plot is riveting. Wild is a page turner, a classic adventure tale full of wilderness dangers and physical hardships and sweeping vistas which Strayed heart-achingly renders in her clean, clear-eyed prose. This is a good read. A damn fine read. But it's something more than that, too. It has a purpose beyond the tales of bears and rattlesnakes and water filters and blisters.
In this detailed, in-the-moment re-enactment, [Strayed] delineates the travails and triumphs of...three grueling months.
Strayed’s writing admirably conveys the rigors and rewards of long-distance hiking.