Cheryl Strayed’s landmark memoir Wild, subtitled “From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” published in March 2012, is one of the few trail memoirs to break out to a general audience and the only one by a woman. In May of that year Oprah Winfrey made it the first selection in her re-launched Oprah’s Book Club. In July the book reached number one on the New York Times Best Seller list. The film adaptation with Reese Witherspoon, released in December 2014, was a box office hit, grossing more than $50 million and receiving two Academy Award nominations.
It’s a good bet that Wild is the one memoir you’ll see on the bookshelves of any major outfitter. Which is odd, because stopping at the Oregon border, Strayed doesn’t come close to finishing the PCT. She even skips the High Sierra section due to heavy snowpack that year. Though she earns her trail cred in other ways, like toughing it out through the southern California desert with an overweight pack and post holing through snow in the northern part of the state.
Strayed’s backstory is filled with drama. She falls apart in her twenties after the unexpected death of her doting mother. Self-destructive behaviors ensue, including leaving an angelic husband. Strayed stumbles across a guidebook to the PCT and dimly sees the potential the trail offers for purification and redemption.
Her first few days on the trail with a crushing pack have become the archetype of the ill-prepared newbie. She struggles to set up her tent, finds she has the wrong kind of stove fuel, and wonders if the deodorant and reading library are necessary.
I’ll confess it took me a few chapters to find sympathy for the character. But Strayed’s ultimate redemption at the Oregon border, finally becoming the woman her mother intended, moved me. In the end she gives us a beautiful book that is really a story about growing up. With help from nature and the trail.
Trail Memoir 