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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BEST SELLER * Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection. * A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe--and built her back up again.
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.
Author Notes
Cheryl Strayed, née Nyland, was born on September 17, 1968 in Spangler, Pennsylvania. She is an American memoirist, novelist and essayist. Her second book, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail was published in the United States on March 20, 2012, and has been translated into more than thirty languages. It is an Oprah Book Club 2.0 choice, made the New York Times Bestseller list and was optioned for film rights by Reese Witherspoon even before it was published. The film is scheduled to be released in 2014.
Strayed's first book, the novel Torch, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February 2006. She attended the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree, graduating magna cum laude with a double major in English and Women's Studies. A long-time feminist activist, Strayed served on the first board of directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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, a 2,663-mile wilderness route stretching from the Mexican border to the Canadian and traversing nine mountain ranges and three states. 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 from cancer; 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. Starting from Mojave, Calif., hauling a pack she called the Monster because it was so huge and heavy, she had to perform a dead lift to stand, and then could barely make a mile an hour. 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. Agent: Janet Silver, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Agency. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Torch, 2006) life quickly disintegrated. Family ties melted away; she divorced her husband and slipped into drug use. For the next four years life was a series of disappointments. "I was crying over all of it," she writes, "over the sick mire I'd made of my life since my mother died; over the stupid existence that had become my own. I was not meant to be this way, to live this way, to fail so darkly." While waiting in line at an outdoors store, Strayed 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; for her, hiking the PCT was "powerful and fundamental" and "truly hard and glorious." Strayed was 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, "the unexpected and sweet happenings that stand out in stark relief to the challenges of the trail." A candid, inspiring narrative of the author's brutal physical and psychological journey through a wilderness of despair to a renewed sense of self.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Echoing the ever-popular search for wilderness salvation by Chris McCandless (Back to the Wild, 2011) and every other modern-day disciple of Thoreau, Strayed tells the story of her emotional devastation after the death of her mother and the weeks she spent hiking the 1,100-mile Pacific Crest Trail. As her family, marriage, and sanity go to pieces, Strayed drifts into spontaneous encounters with other men, to the consternation of her confused husband, and eventually hits rock bottom while shooting up heroin with a new boyfriend. Convinced that nothing else can save her, she latches onto the unlikely idea of a long solo hike. Woefully unprepared (she fails to read about the trail, buy boots that fit, or pack practically), she relies on the kindness and assistance of those she meets along the way, much as McCandless did. 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. Experienced backpackers will roll their eyes. But this chronicle, perfect for book clubs, is certain to spark lively conversation.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
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 brandnew 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. Strayed encounters bears, rattlesnakes and predatory men. She loses six toenails and suffers countless bruises. Dam Shapiro's next book, "Still Writing," will be published in 2013.
Library Journal Review
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.
Table of Contents
| Author's Note | p. ix |
| Map | p. xi |
| Prologue | p. 3 |
| Part 1 The Ten Thousand Things | |
| 1 The Ten Thousand Things | p. 9 |
| 2 Splitting | p. 28 |
| 3 Hunching in a Remotely Upright Position | p. 38 |
| Part 2 Tracks | |
| 4 The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California | p. 47 |
| 5 Tracks | p. 61 |
| 6 A Bull in Both Directions | p. 76 |
| 7 The Only Girl in the Woods | p. 102 |
| Part 3 Range of Light | |
| 8 Corvidology | p. 119 |
| 9 Staying Found | p. 136 |
| 10 Range of Light | p. 146 |
| Part 4 Wild | |
| 11 The Lou Out of Lou | p. 177 |
| 12 This Far | p. 190 |
| 13 The Accumulation of Trees | p. 206 |
| 14 Wild | p. 222 |
| Part 5 Box of Rain | |
| 15 Box of Rain | p. 237 |
| 16 Mazama | p. 262 |
| 17 Into a Primal Gear | p. 274 |
| 18 Queen of the PCT | p. 289 |
| 19 The Dream of a Common Language | p. 300 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 313 |
| Books Burned on the PCT | p. 317 |