SAYS FYL

Book Review: Wild, by Cheryl Strayed (Knopf)

Right from the start, Cheryl Strayed is upfront: this book is nothing more (and nothing less) than her edited journal from a 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s her impressions, her feelings, her stumbling attempts at understanding herself as the trail unfolded—mile after mile, shaped by the people she met, the views she absorbed, the challenges she endured, and the kind of unexpected moments only a long walk can bring.

So basically, it’s one woman’s story of what happened on a trail. And honestly? At first I couldn’t imagine what relevance it could possibly have for me. Which is why I ignored it for a long time. It only landed in my hands because the pandemic left the library shelves stripped bare of new releases. Old books were all that was left, so I gave in and picked this one up.

That was years ago. And only now am I getting around to writing about the book. Clearly, my trail isn’t the Pacific Crest—it’s the long winding path of procrastination. (One of these days, I really need to get a handle on it.)

And I’m glad I finally did.

• It reminded me of the general goodness of people. Time and again, strangers showed up for Cheryl with small acts of generosity—water caches, meals, a bed for the night. In her brokenness she found kindness, and it was a nudge to me that even when the world feels harsh, there are still people willing to make the journey lighter for someone else.
• It unearthed gritty truths about myself. Cheryl’s loneliness, her anger, her regrets—they echoed deeper than I expected. Reading her trail confessions made me wonder what long walk it would take for me to face my own buried truths. Maybe I don’t need 1,100 miles, but maybe I do need to carve out space to come clean with myself.
• And perhaps most needed of all—it nudged me not to fall into the trap of wallowing. Cheryl carried grief, failure, and shame in her pack, but every mile forced her to either drop the weight or be crushed by it. For me, it was a reminder that sorrow has its place, but life keeps asking us to lace up and walk forward.

Not bad for a trail journal.

Some Quotes

“I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.”

“In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.”

“Perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant that I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I’d lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I’d been skeptical bout, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.”

“What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done? . . . What if what made me do all those things . . . was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was??

“How wild it was, to let it be.”

“Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”

“[Books] were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually living in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.”

“I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was searching as I was skeptical. I didn’t know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even what the word faith meant, in all of its complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.”

“Reading’s my reward at the end of the day.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden.”

“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.”

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