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Staff Reviews
Wild is the best memoir I've read since Gail Caldwell's Let's Take the Long Way Home. I felt like I was on the trail with Cheryl; I could see the wilderness in front of me, I could feel the monstrous backpack on my back. This isn't just a book for fans of memoirs. This is a book for people who are fans of pitch-perfect writing that tells a story with unrestrained exuberance. I loved this book.
— Michele
We are not our bodies, but we are inextricable from them. When our bodies strain, we strain; when our bodies are damaged, we feel the damage. We are not our hearts, but we need our hearts to heal when they have holes in them. Breaking under the weight of years of trauma, Cheryl Strayed set out on an 1,100-mile hike, solo through the Pacific Crest Trail, to find out what she could survive. Her journey is one of constant physical pain, fear, hunger, freezing and burning temperatures, thirst, blood, loneliness, and healing. If our bodies can make it over the mountain, we can make it over the mountain, and on our climb, we'll see how beautiful pits and valleys can be from a distance.
— Sarah
April 2012 Indie Next List
“The inspiring story of Strayed's solo journey on the Pacific Crest Trail snags you from the beginning and keeps you engaged the whole way through. It was a bold move considering that she had no backpacking experience prior to her trip, but in the years following her mother's death and the subsequent dissolution of her family, Strayed was no stranger to bold moves. The challenges, both external and internal, that she endures while on the trail are balanced with stories about her life leading up to her brave decision to hike alone for months in the rugged Western wilderness. This is a story of survival in every sense of the word, and one that will stick with you long after you finish reading.”
— Deborah Castorina, Waucoma Bookstore, Hood River, OR
Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and she would do it alone.
Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
About the Author
CHERYL STRAYED is the author of the #1 New York Times best seller Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which was the first selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0 and became an Oscar-nominated film starring Reese Witherspoon;Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, a national best seller now the basis of the WBUR podcast Dear Sugar Radio, co-hosted with Steve Almond; and Torch, her debut novel. Her books have been translated into forty languages, and her essays and other writings have appeared in numerous publications.
Praise For…
"Spectacular. . . . A literary and human triumph." —The New York Times Book Review
"One of the most original, heartbreaking, and beautiful American memoirs in years. . . . Awe-inspiring." —NPR
"An addictive, gorgeous book that not only entertains, but leaves us the better for having read it. . . . Strayed is a formidable talent." —The Boston Globe
"Strayed's language is so vivid, sharp and compelling that you feel the heat of the desert, the frigid ice of the High Sierra, and the breathtaking power of one remarkable woman finding her way—and herself—one brave step at a time." —People (4 stars)
"Pretty much obliterated me. I was reduced, during the book's final third, to puddle-eyed cretinism. . . . 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. . . . The cumulative welling up I experienced during Wild was partly a response to that too infrequent sight: that of a writer finding her voice, and sustaining it, right in front of your eyes." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"Devastating and glorious. . . . By laying bare a great unspoken truth of adulthood—that many things in life don't turn out the way you want them to, and that you can and must live through them anyway—Wild feels real in many ways that many books about 'finding oneself' . . . do not." —Slate
"Incisive and telling. . . . [Strayed] has the ineffable gift every writer longs for of saying exactly what she means in lines that are both succinct and poetic . . . an inborn talent for articulating angst and the gratefulness that comes when we overcome it." —The Washington Post
"Vivid, touching and ultimately inspiring account of a life unraveling and of the journey that put it back together." —The Wall Street Journal
"Brave seems like the right word to sum up this woman and her book. . . . Strayed's journey is exceptional." —San Francisco Chronicle
"Strayed's journey was at least as transcendent as it was turbulent. She faced down hunger, thirst, injury, fatigue, boredom, loss, bad weather, and wild animals. Yet she also reached new levels of joy, accomplishment, courage, peace, and found extraordinary companionship." —The Christian Science Monitor
"Strayed . . . catalogs her epic hike . . . with a raw emotional power that makes the book difficult to put down. . . . In walking, and finally, years later, in writing, Strayed finds her way again. And her path is as dazzlingly beautiful as it is tragic." —Los Angeles Times
"A fearless story, told in honest prose that is wildly lyrical as often as it is dirtily physical." —Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Strayed writes a crisp scene; her sentences hum with energy. She can describe a trail-parched yearning for Snapple like no writer I know. . . . It becomes impossible not to root for her." —The Plain Dealer
"Brilliant. . . . Cheryl Strayed emerges from her grief-stricken journey as a practitioner of a rare and vital vocation. She has become an intrepid cartographer of the human heart." —Houston Chronicle
"A deeply honest memoir about mother and daughter, solitude and courage, and regaining footing one step at a time." —Vogue
"Strayed's relationship with her environment is humble and respectful, not exploitative. The landscape she travails is not a prop for her self-actualization, but a real, physical world that bewilders her, a world in which she learns she can survive bewilderment. . . . Strayed bears the torn feet and bruised back of a true pilgrim. Hers is high-voltage prose that challenges any preconceived notions about what it means to be a woman alone, and what it means to journey. . . . Wild will gather you up with its tenderness. It will flay you with its honesty." —Los Angeles Review of Books
“The inspiring story of Strayed's solo journey on the Pacific Crest Trail snags you from the beginning and keeps you engaged the whole way through. It was a bold move considering that she had no backpacking experience prior to her trip, but in the years following her mother's death and the subsequent dissolution of her family, Strayed was no stranger to bold moves. The challenges, both external and internal, that she endures while on the trail are balanced with stories about her life leading up to her brave decision to hike alone for months in the rugged Western wilderness. This is a story of survival in every sense of the word, and one that will stick with you long after you finish reading.”