At twenty-six, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's rapid death from cancer, her family disbanded and her marriage crumbled. With nothing to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to walk eleven-hundred miles of the west coast of America - from the Mojave Desert, through California and Oregon, and into Washington state - and to do it alone. She had no experience of long-distance hiking and the journey was nothing more than a line on a map. But it held a promise - a promise of piecing together a life that lay in ruins at her feet.
Strayed's account captures the agonies - both mental and physical - of her incredible journey; how it maddened and terrified her, and how, ultimately, it healed her. Wild is a brutal memoir of survival, grief and redemption: a searing portrayal of life at its lowest ebb and at its highest tide.
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[The trees were tall, but I was taller, standing above them on a steep mountain slope in northern California]***
(Atlantic Books, 27 May 2014, first published 20 March 2012, ebook, 201 pages, Around the Year in 52 Books 2019, a book that includes a journey, borrowed from @GlasgowLib via @OverDriveLibs)
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I devoured this memoir in a couple of hours. Cheryl is incredibly brave and badass. I could never do what she did, hike over 1500 miles alone. I doubt I could hike 20 miles. I found this memoir incredibly sad at times, focusing on Cheryl's grief over her mother's death and the breakdown of her marriage interwoven with her experiences hiking, both the good and bad. Thankfully, there weren't too many bad experiences other than the damage caused to her feet because her boots were too small and running short of money because she forgot to put some in her supply box between points. Hats off to her for doing something so incredible. I loved the end when she reaches the end of the trail.
