Lizzie's Reviews > Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Ok ok good. Everyone's new favorite book: yes, I loved it too.

DO YOU WANT TO HEAR SOMETHING STUPID? During the first half, I wasn't sure how much I liked it. Because I am crazy. Because it is good! It is all good. But it was different, at first, than I expected. I was joking before, that for fans of Sugar (an inevitable readership for this book), there almost needs to be two ratings: one for book-ness, and one for Sugar-ness. By nature, the essays in "Dear Sugar" are written in a way that requires them to relate her story to a metaphor, that make her experiences reach through the ordinary to say something about another situation. This writer knows how to pull the honesty of life out of very regular things, the kinds of things that make you feel, "Why is this getting to me? Everything is fine." She knows why, she can explain, she can cup you in her palm and show you what the world does.

So I was looking for this in the book on page one, greedily. And honestly, to me it wasn't all there. I liked it for sure, but it wasn't tugging inordinately at my heart, just telling me stuff in a really honest way. There is a lot to learn about what she's going through, and that is what you're getting into in the beginning. Then halfway through, something changed. The fox happened and I cried, was one of the things. And I thought, when I read that: there we go, that is it, that is what I've needed from this. It's a breath-catching moment that relates to what she's been writing and means everything to her, and she delivers that everything right on the page, in actually just a few lines.

WELL THEN little did I know that immediately next up is Lady The Horse, and I would soon be dead from crying. I… cried so much, that next day. And books don't actually make me do that very often. But here, unfortunately, I started to read that chapter on the subway home from work — normally a PERFECTLY SAFE reading environment — and I knew I was going to be in trouble. I think the most terrible part for me was actually its beginning, when she knew the inevitability of what would happen, and then we all just had to watch it. I got off of the train and couldn't just put my bookmark there, so I stood outside on the sidewalk finishing the section, and then I walked into a park and stood behind a tree in the dark to hide while I cried my brains out.

Happily, I came back to life in order to finish the book. And I don't know if it is just the unmistakeable power of that section, but everything after felt different. It all got me. She is writing the necessary symbolism deep, deep inside the story, and it is almost never gone afterward. Partly, her journey affords a lot of its payoff at this point — she never quits learning what she's doing, but the first half is almost all learning, and the second half has her also knowing, and noticing, and reaching.

In general, there's a few things going on here. The author is hiking this trail for three months, and the point is that she doesn't know what she is doing. She started to do it because it seemed right and not because she seemed ready. She literally didn't know how to carry everything she had to bring with her. She also literally doesn't know what will be at the end of the path, after the point on the map at the Bridge of the Gods, what then. It's huge, it's all of it huge and right and good.

I think the theme I liked most, though, was about identity. A lot is in there, of course, because when she takes this trip she is in a huge amount of transition, and that is basically the point of the whole endeavor. But I was surprised that there is actually a lot of more literal identity crises in the story, not so much of finding where she fits as finding she's not even on the side of the line she thinks she's on. This happens kind of a lot: the hobo mistakes her for a hobo, the journalist mistakes her for a hobo, the hippies mistake her for a hippie. She finds herself so far outside of normal life, both because she's living literally outside and because she happens to be cold broke, and there is so much looking in at the world with inarticulable longing (often for cheeseburgers). Some people get really proud of going off the grid and out of the mainstream when they've had some of the privilege to sacrifice it in the first place, but that's not really Cheryl's motive (this is not Into the Wild, thank god) and she doesn't expect to think of herself that way. I think it makes her feel even more lost on the personal side of her journey, and means that she has even more work to do to make her new life work than she thought.

Relatedly, she thinks some interesting thoughts about gender. There's a lot of the basic-feminist "being a woman alone" pride, of course. One loses count of how many guys make comments about her hiking the trip alone, often paired with the veiled threat that they would never permit a woman who was "theirs" to do so. But what's really interesting are the specific situations she runs into where she has to figure out if she is safe. She writes through every step in her calculations every time she is afraid, and the times she is afraid of men are even more interesting than any of the times she is afraid of wild animals or dangerous terrain. She's inspecting the line across which things can become irrevocable, and they go in both directions. (A bull in both directions, I suppose.)

Also, this is silly, but (view spoiler)[like her, I totally wanted her to get laid on her trip and I was so haaaappy when she did. (hide spoiler)]

I'd like to say that that's it, because I think it would be cooler to say so, but the truth is that just like all good fans of anything, I love Cheryl Strayed because she means something to me, me, that I don't think could possibly mean as much to anyone else (though obviously, that's the magic). This is particularly forceful for her writing because she writes about her life, and things about her life and her feelings remind me of very important things about mine. The subjects of her essays often bring this out fiercely, and there is plenty of it present in this book, too. A great deal of the pages I folded down are personal, personal. It feels like a letter in which she's giving, well, advice.

She just has such a gift for this. I think we're lucky she knows how to make it a gift for the rest of us, too.