Wild
Cheryl Strayed, 2012
Memoir & biography Travel & nature
A grieving, divorced twenty-six-year-old with no hiking experience walks the Pacific Crest Trail alone—and finds a way back to herself. A plain, lyrical voice moves between grief and memory, with long solitary stretches that feel slow and honest.
Feels like grief, hope and wonder. About memory and solitude.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you are drawn to memoirs about grief, solitude, and walking your way through a hard time. The loss is heavy and returns often, so it may not suit you when you want something light.
Why read it
It shows how a life can be rebuilt in small, unglamorous steps, and it gives you the company of an honest voice when you need one.
A page from the book
The wilderness grief leaves you in, and the years it takes to walk out.
It took me years to take my place among the ten thousand things again. To be the woman my mother raised. To remember how she said honey and picture her particular gaze. I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn’t know where I was going until I got there. Cheryl Strayed.Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 launched in 2012 with Wild as its first selection; the film with Reese Witherspoon followed in 2014.
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Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Wild for me?
- You may like it if you are drawn to memoirs about grief, solitude, and walking your way through a hard time. The loss is heavy and returns often, so it may not suit you when you want something light.
- What is Wild like?
- A plain, lyrical voice moves between grief and memory, with long solitary stretches that feel slow and honest. Feels like grief, hope and wonder. About memory and solitude.
- What should I read after Wild?
- If you liked Wild, try When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi), Eat, Pray, Love (Elizabeth Gilbert) and Island of the Blue Dolphins (Scott O'Dell).
A taste of the feed
There is a kind of crying that only happens where nobody can hear it.
Everything else about the three-years-ago scene was different, though. That time, I was not in Rome but in the upstairs bathroom of the big house in the suburbs of New York which I’d recently purchased with my husband. It was a cold November, around three o’clock in the morning. My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and—just as during all those nights before—I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and confusion and grief.
Eat, Pray, Love · Elizabeth Gilbert
What it costs to be the only one not counting the dead as profit.
Many of our tribe went to the cliff each night to count the number killed during the day. They counted the dead otter and thought of the beads and other things that each pelt meant. But I never went to the cove and whenever I saw the hunters with their long spears skimming over the water, I was angry, for these animals were my friends.
Island of the Blue Dolphins · Scott O'Dell
The silence after you stop being corrected is not kindness.
He said, when you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up. And that’s a lesson that stuck with me my whole life. Is that when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care.
The Last Lecture · Randy Pausch
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