Wild (Oprah's Book Club 2.0)

by Cheryl Strayed

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.

• ISBN10: 132215547X
• ISBN13: 9781322155470
• Publish Date: 1 January 2012
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 29 April 2015
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Format: eBook
• Language: English

Reviews

[nsperry92]

Sure, this is a memoir. It’s supposed to be about the growth and challenges of the author. It’s supposed to inspire the reader to find yourself during hard times and such.

But...I really just don’t get the appeal of this book.

Strayed really doesn’t talk about her growth or maturation on the PCT. Instead she fills her books with memories of the bad stuff and seems to always need to fill us in on her sexual desire towards the men she encounters on and off the trail.

Cheryl - I don’t care that you want a man to touch you again. I don’t care that you noticed that a nurse who cared for your dying mother wore his pants a little too tight and you liked it. Tell me more about the trail. Tell me about your connection with nature. Tell me about HOW YOU HAVE MATURED. It’s okay to have friends and want a solid romantic connection with a partner, but come on.

Friends - if you likes this book, what did you find to be appealing and/or inspiring?

DNF - 73%

[readingwithbecs]

This is the memoir of Cheryl Strayed. In her early 20'es she lost her mother to cancer. Is this book Strayed tells her story of how she fell apart after her mothers death, and how that got her to make the spontaneous decision to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, which starts at the Mexican border and ens at the Canadian border.
The book is mainly about her hiking the PCT, but we also get flashbacks from her life, mainly involving her mother.
Strayed does a fantastic job at describing her journey and her life in a way that makes you want to keep reading and learn more about her. If you like memoirs, I highly recommend this one.

[jeannamichel]

I’ve been wanting to read this one for a while. I’m glad I did because it was exhilarating and inspiring. It, also, made me realize that books about survival aren’t really my thing.

[Liz (Bent Bookworm)]

I really regret that I listened to the nay-sayers and put this book off for SO long. Ridiculous. A few of them really turned out to be shamers, which is awful and sad. I really wish I could find the review I read that said Wild (Strayed, 2012) was a drug and sex filled orgy. The hell?!? Yes, both are mentioned and are, at some point, part of the author’s life. She is brutally honest and upfront about her struggles and how she deals with them. She doesn’t recommend trying heroin. She definitely feels guilt about cheating on her husband. Did I agree with all the conclusions she seems to draw? No. But I still felt it was a good book worth reading.

As a hiker myself, I can say Cheryl starts off as what is possibly the worst prepared thru-hiker in history. I cringed as I read the descriptions of her gigantic pack (aptly named Monster), the way she buys guidebooks but doesn’t read them, and instead of preparing in the last week of her trip, spends it hooking up with a guy that she already knows is very, very bad for her. I wanted to shake her, and I suspect I share that feeling with most of her friends and remaining family at the time. After her mother’s illness and death, Cheryl makes a string of bad choices involving cheating on her husband – a man she continuously claims to love and probably the best relationship to ever come into her life, at least the way it is portrayed – and using heroin. As she approaches rock bottom, she knows she needs to make changes but seems to lack the willpower to do anything at all. She changes her name, and not just back to her maiden name, but a new name she picks almost straight out of a dictionary because it is the only thing that “feels” right. She goes with her brother to put her mother’s dying horse out of it’s misery (thank you, Cheryl Strayed, for making me ugly-cry). Her divorce is finalized – but her relationship with Paul is far from finished. THAT, is probably the part of her story I am least understanding and sympathetic to. She cheats on this man that she admits is lovely to her, who will TAKE HER BACK after her multiple affairs, and yet, she still can’t let him go. Darling, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. I’m assuming she’s figured that out in the 20 odd years that have passed since this part of the story. I hope so. Her description of the notarizing of their divorce decree was a bit unsettling. But, each person’s story is different. Who am I to judge?

Afterwards, we leaned against the cold bricks of a building and kissed, crying and murmuring regrets, our tears mixing together on our faces…snowflakes were melting onto his hair and I wanted to reach up and touch them, but I didn’t.

Her time on the trail is by turns painful and cathartic. As expected (by me, reading this, though obviously not by her), she spends most of her time completely exhausted and in constant pain from her pack, her boots, dehydration. At the same time, I really felt she was a kindred spirit in the way the act of hiking made her feel.

I realized I was having a kind of strange, abstract, retrospective fun. I noticed the beauty that surrounded me, the wonder of things both small and large.

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental.

Yes. Yes it is. And it is why we go outside and torture our feet and backs again, and again, and again. Because nature feeds us, even as we pay the price our soft modern bodies grudgingly give up to her.

Cheryl experiences a lot of growing pains during her PCT time, not all of them physical. What stood out most to me, was how very, very concerned she was about her appearance – to men. Every time she meets a new male on the trail, she starts to worry about her hair, her smell, her hairy legs. Sure, she’s horny as hell – she’s a 20-something female that doesn’t see anyone for days on end – and that’s great! Sexual appetite doesn’t bother me, in fact I think it’s awesome she’s so open about it in a society that traditionally shames women for being sexual beings at all. The issue is that she felt her worth was determined on her sexual attractiveness to men, not that she wanted to fuck. She actually only ends up with one guy during her time on the trail (orgy, my ass).

What really makes the book worth reading (besides all the other interesting things that happen while she’s on the trail), is how she slowly grows out of that poisonous mindset. She becomes a more powerful woman in her own right. She doesn’t need anyone else, definitely not men, to prove to her that she is beautiful and strong and worth something, no matter what anyone else thinks or says. THAT, to me, was the takeaway value of the whole book.

4/5 stars. Despite my disagreement with how Strayed handled some of her life choices and relationships, in the end it’s HER life, not mine, and what she learned during her adventure on the PCT is a story worth reading.

[brokentune]

"Nothing did. Nothing would. Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone. Nothing would put me beside her the moment she died. It broke me up. It cut me off. It tumbled me end over end.
It took me years to take my place among the ten thousand things again. To be the woman my mother raised. To remember how she said honey and picture her particular gaze. I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn’t know where I was going until I got there.
It was a place called the Bridge of the Gods."

I loved this book. Not because it was an uber-inspirational, amazing story - if it had been like that, I would not have much time on this book at all. What I loved about the story was that it was honest in its bluntness and that it did not glorify grief. Reading, Cheryl's story was very easy to relate to even though I did not walk the PCT. But then, every one deals with stuff differently.

So, apart from the description of how Cheryl found a way to deal with the events in her life that overwhelmed her, the book was a funny, smart, down-to-earth reminder of the huge effect that very small things that can have - the pleasure of tasting a favourite soft drink, the warmth of a shower, the feel of tiny frogs jumping on you, the liberation that is gained from not having to wear shoes that are too small.

On that note, as I am writing this review, I have my foot elevated in a position where my heel does not touch anything. I have a (massive) blister from going hiking this past weekend and Cheryl's struggle with her boots is all too real to me. So, whilst I am grateful that Wild - despite the publisher's best marketing efforts - was not the over-dramatised, over-sentimentalised account of a Cheryl's journey, I particularly loved that the book managed to reflect on both grief and practical issues of hiking with a sense of humor and humility. I also now want to visit some of the parts of the PCT, but not before my feet are healed from my recent excursion and not definitely not before I manage to read a map. Map reading skills in particular would have been useful last weekend and would have saved me and my friend from an additional 4 miles of detour. Luckily, neither of us was prone to panicking over the fact that we had - temporarily - gotten lost. Learning not to panic is probably one of the the first things to learn about going hiking.

"It was a deal I’d made with myself months before and the only thing that allowed me to hike alone. I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked. Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did not let myself become afraid. Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn’t long before I actually wasn’t afraid."