At 22, Cheryl Strayed lost her mother to a swiftly progressing cancer and went into an emotional and existential tailspin, hell-bent on demolishing her social life and her marriage via reckless drug use and sexual infidelities. At 26, broken and alone, she decided to embark on a 1,100-mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, equipped with little more than a curiously powerful mix of desperation and determination.
Strayed's three-month journey is the focal point of her memoir, Wild (Knopf), in which she interweaves suspenseful accounts of her most harrowing crises with imagistic moments of reflection. Her profound grief over her mother's death, her emotional abandonment by her siblings and stepfather, and her personal shortcomings and misadventures are all conveyed with a consistently grounded, quietly pained self-awareness. On the trail, Strayed fends off everything from loneliness to black bears; we groan when her hiking boots go tumbling off a cliff and we rejoice as she transforms from a terrified amateur hiker into the "Queen of the PCT"—the nickname bestowed upon her by assorted backpacker friends she connects with along the trail. In a meandering style that embodies her wanderlust, Strayed transports us with this gripping, ultimately uplifting tale.
