Sometimes a book walks into your life at exactly the right moment and your soul sucks it in like oxygen. This book, “Wild: from lost to found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” found me this past weekend–right as I was descending into the darkness, right as I was losing my breath, drowning.
This book is why I read. Reading has saved me so many times and this profoundly heartbreaking but ultimately redemptive book did precisely that.
I read it in two sittings, gulping it down greedily. All day today, scenes from the book kept replaying in my mind. I haven’t read a book this good since Mary Karr’s Lit. Like Mary Karr, Cheryl Strayed possesses a gritty honesty. She’s utterly candid and open about her failures and mistakes while refusing to be ashamed or self-indulgent. Wild is unflinching in its clear-eyed self-awareness. This book is saving me and changing me. I can’t wait to read it a second and third time.
From the book description:
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State–and to do it alone….”Wild” vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
Read this book. You won’t be disappointed.
*Note: the book contains raw language, drug use, sex.*
