Cheryl Strayed, Wild

Published March 2012

"But it was too late now, I knew, and there was only my dead, insular, overly optimistic, non-college-praparing, occasionally-child-abandoning, pot-smoking, wooden-spoon-wielding, feel-free-to-call-me-by-my-name mom to blame. She had failed. She had failed. She had so profoundly failed me. Fuck her, I thought, so mad I stopped walking. And then I wailed." 

In the wake of the sudden death of her mother, a marriage failed by her own numerous affairs and flirtations with drug abuse, Cheryl Strayed decides to wander the Pacific Crest Trail during the summer of 1995 in an effort to bring her life back on track. Written some 17-18 years later, Strayed relives the life altering trip while offering occasional glimpses of her unstable early childhood, atypical upbringing in Minnesota and the painful loss of her mother and her subsequent marital crisis and divorce. All of which contribute to her arrival at the breaking point that makes her hit the trail with virtually no expertise, a helpless excess of weighty items and a shattered heart full of ambivalence. This autobiography looks and reads like something you pick up in the airport bookshop before heading out for a week under the sun, but in addition it packs some great moments that, although this book would amount to be only a minor literary feat at the very best, makes the book a real page turner with an honesty and freshness that I haven't encountered in a while. 

There is an almost banal yet universal Kierkegaard-esque "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards" truth to Cheryl's experiences as she describes them, but although I found myself sympathetic to her throughout most of the book I could not help to get annoyed with the fact that she seems weirdly unreflected about her own situation through vast portions of the book. In a peculiar way I felt this lack of reflection projected onto my own reading experience. I chugged it down over the course of two days, crying unwillingly over sections that I suspect were perhaps put there to make me cry, rooting for Cheryl as she made her way up North towards her goal, feeling the tension as the last cents are being counted, cringing at the various descriptions of lost toe-nails, blistered feet and bleeding limbs. Now, writing this, I pound myself on the head. Why did I fall for this? When my mom endorsed Eat, Pray, Love to me some years ago I promised myself to never spend my precious time reading through it. Coming from Scandinavia where we're bottle-fed a multitude of tales about hurt but strong-willed, adventurous, in-transformation women I asked myself: how many of those does the world really need?

Perhaps more than I thought. Like Eat, Pray, Love came into its filmic being with Julia "I'm-gonna-eat-a-pizza-and-change-my-life-by-not-counting-the-calories" Roberts, Wild is now also making the transition onto the silver screen starring Reese Witherspoon. Whether it's romanticized India or 

the nostalgic yearning for the authentic Italiy or the rough, demanding terrain of the Pacifc Crest Trail, there seems to be a significant interest in witnessing women's real life experiences as they venture out into the great unknown in times of deep personal crisis. Several elements feed into this type of novel: They undoubtedly romanticize the mobility theme in order to be picked up by the very audience that would also devour the common low brow chick lit novels. They mostly function at the level of amplifying the banal ("I'd set out to hike the trail so that I I could reflect upon my life, to think about everything that had broken me and make myself whole again." Strayed, pp 106 in the e-book). Contemporary, easily devoured Bildungsromane that follow the standard trajectory of rock-bottom, crisis, action, emerging. Let's make clear that there's nothing new to any of the formal aspects of Wild. And while the content is not exactly ground-breaking either, I feel compelled to recognize that Wild represents a break from the passively waiting for Mr. Right, mind numbingly chattering Carrie Bradshaw's who have pestered us in the past decades with their layers of couture and make-up. While Cheryl Strayed doesn't teach me anything fundamentally revolutionizing, she does assume an agency that I have missed witnessing in the lighter genre literatures written by women, and she does tell her story with a pleasing amount of self irony. But ultimately she leaves me with the same ambivalence she herself carries throughout her journey: the uncertainty of whether it's love or hate that drove me through 400 pages of hurting feet.