Book Review #42 - Wild

The premise is fascinating. A woman with no real hiking experiences decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, from southern California to the Washington/Oregon border...1100 miles in all, to cope with her unraveling life.

I admit that I would love to do this. I'm always a bit jealous of people who give in to their self-absorbed motives. I'm never sure what gene is necessary to buck the responsible adult, responsible wife, responsible parent out of the way and succumb to that desire to escape from real life and do something outrageous or extraordinary but memoirs and biographies seems to be limited to those who have it. I'm not saying it's always a bad thing. Heroes, presidents, adventurers, artists all seem to be guided by a magnet that leads them away from the dull and expected. For their stories, I'm always amazed by their courage to be different. To lead. To dare. But, for someone like Cheryl Strayed, who I didn't at all like when getting to know her through her memoir, I think much less magnanimous thoughts. They are more like, "Get over yourself!"

I'm not sure what the point of Wild is. Strayed admits herself at the beginning of her trek that she had no real business being on the trail with so little experience and preparation. She makes the claim that hiking is really just putting one foot in front of the other over and over again. So, I thought it might be a sort of cautionary tale that warns other would-be novice hikers that hiking the PCT is about much more than moving your feet. But, she ends up ok. Oh, she has lots of side trips that include shelter, new boots, hamburgers and even a date to a nightclub but her adventure also includes rattlesnake scares, snow, water rationing and equipment failure. And so, even though her hike didn't really resemble what I imagine a pure PCT adventure would or should, perhaps the point is that we tend to over think things and, really, anyone at all can hike the PCT with success. Seriously, after reading the book, you have to think, "Well...if she did it, so could I." She's kind of an idiot.

Memoirs are hard for me to review because it's not just about the writing. Without a doubt, Wild is an interesting tale. A single woman hiking alone in perilous conditions is just not the kind of thing most of us know anything about. Of course I want to know what happens next. For the most part, the details she included about the trail - it's scenery and topography - were the best part of the book. I wanted to be on the trail myself.

But, memoirs always come with baggage. Why is this person writing this? Are they famous or wise? Did they have an extraordinary life or at least an extraordinary experience? I suppose Cheryl Strayed's motive would be an extraordinary experience but she includes enough of her life, as one writing a memoir must do, to taint the take-away message.

Cheryl lost her mother when she was in her early twenties. Her mother was only 45. Her loss influences everything else throughout the book. In essence, this is a book about her grief and I acknowledge that there is no proper way to grieve. If someone deals with it all by abusing a loving husband with frequent adultery, shooting up heroin and escaping from a former life by leaving it all behind to go hiking....it is what it is. That's their way. But, there were times when her way of writing about it was so ripe with self-indulgence that her my-mother-died carte blanche got all used up. For instance, there was this sentence early on in the book that just left me reeling. She wrote, "I got an abortion and learned how to make dehydrated tuna flakes and turkey jerky and took a refresher course on basic first aid and practiced using my water purifier in my kitchen sink." Just like that. She had gotten pregnant from a heroin-fueled affair and I'm not saying she should have been a mother. I'm not even saying that she owed her readers some kind of explanation about how ending her pregnancy made her feel. She didn't need to reveal her abortion to us at all. What I am saying is that if you are going to mention getting an abortion in your memoir, it'd be best if you didn't include making tuna and turkey jerky in the same sentence. I think the topic of abortion deserves, at the very, very least, its own sentence. It is not the kind of topic most readers treat lightly. I had a very hard time garnering up sympathy for her after that thoughtless inclusion. Especially upon later discovery about her own mother's unexpected and unwed pregnancy. There was no connecting of the dots. Just Cheryl, Cheryl, Cheryl.

I'm glad she learned something. Or found peace. Or forgave herself. Or whatever. She's just another person who doesn't have any bigger troubles than the rest of us and yet the likes of me and Oprah buy her book anyway. She is lining her pockets with our chump change. That is wild.