Margins Review: Wild, by Cheryl Strayed

Hold on to your pants, girls; it's gonna be a wild ride!

  Disclaimer: a version of the following review was originally written for publication 

in Issue 19 of  The Willamette Collegian (@WUCollegian).

     This may come as a bit of a surprise to anyone who knows me, but I’m not a girl that’s caught crying over movies or books all that often. No matter how moving the scene, how compelling the plot, or how wibbly-wobbly I may really be feeling on the inside, my eyes remain blissfully dry nine times out of ten. The only reason I’m telling you this is so that you know exactly what kind of a mortifyingly big deal it was to have a friend surprise-interrupt me as I was in the ugliest phase of a middle school style emotional meltdown while reading the last quarter of Cheryl Strayed’s brilliant memoir.

     After her mother died of cancer at 45, Strayed was left alone and parentless at 22. Finding herself separated from her husband, living in a tiny apartment, working as a waitress, shooting heroin and feeling “as low and mixed-up as I’d ever been,” she decides to take on the Pacific Crest Trail in search of what she calls “radical aloneness.” So, equipped with only an overstuffed backpack, ill-fitting hiking boots, a few dollars and very little experience, Strayed sets off to reinvent the life she feels she’s already lost. But my waterfall of tears and the resulting revocation of my ‘cold & heartless’ reader badge notwithstanding, I don’t mean to imply that Wild is any kind of a downer, because it’s definitely not! What it actually is, though, is one hell of a heart-wrenching, pillow-punching, yell-at-your-friend-to-leave-so-you-can-pick-up-the-broken-pieces-of-your-shattered-dignity good read. Strayed spends much of the book recounting her bizarre adventures in the wilderness as well as her strange interactions with the people she meets along the way, writing with fierce prose and sharp humor about some seriously dire situations which involve everything from her being pitted against the elements, wild animals and her own inexperience, to her tragic inability to afford a cheeseburger.

     Desensitized by heavily jargoned theoretical readings and eye-bleeding amounts of thesis research, I came to Wild with a heart that beat more out of habit than feeling. Strayed’s captivating tale of self discovery and healing in the Pacific wilderness repeatedly stomped on that listless contraption and gave it a good kick to the proverbial curb. Somewhere in the process of reading about this brave, reckless, and grieving young woman’s trials, my reader-self was transformed into something that felt more like it wanted to start exploring the wilds and damn the consequences rather than spend one more evening watching the world passively walk by a cafe window.

     Even in the life of the most prolific reader, there are only so many books you can honestly say have really made an impact on you or changed the way you thought about the world. For me, your typical jaded and cynical college girl living in the era of text-message breakups and melodramatic blog diaries, Wild is one of those rare mind-altering exceptions. It tells the insanely personal story of one individual’s much-needed spiritual regeneration found through the complete surrender of past identities and a deep immersion into nature in all its brutality, a life experience of Strayed’s that turns out to be indirectly responsible for unleashing a powerfully influential voice upon the literary world 17 years later.

And so, without reservation, I give Wild... 
... five red-laced, kick-ass Raichle hiking boots out of five!

* * * * * 

5 / 5