The Walking Cure: Talking to Cheryl Strayed About What Made Wild Piece of work

Reese Witherspoon, Wild, 2014. Photograph: Anne Marie Trick/Courtesy of Fox Searchlight

Midway on her life'south journey, Cheryl Strayed constitute herself in dark forest. Or a quarter-way, really: At the historic period of 26, motherless, divorced, dabbling in heroin, adrift from her stepfather and siblings and her ain old cocky, Strayed made her way to California, hoisted a backpack, and set up off to hike 1,100 miles in the wilderness, from the Mojave Desert to a place on the Oregon-Washington border called Bridge of the Gods.

Ix days later she finished, she met a man in a Tex-Mex articulation in Portland. They got married. They had two kids. Strayed wrote Torch, a semi-autobiographical novel that was quietly but kindly received. She wrote essays. She wrote, anonymously, "Dear Sugar," the cult-favorite advice ­column of the online literary magazine The Rumpus. Then, in 2012, 17 years after she stepped back into civilization, she published a memoir near her fourth dimension in the wilderness: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Past that point, Strayed really was midway through her life, and information technology suddenly went a lilliputian berserk. The New York Times critic Dwight Garner described weeping over Wild, called it "loose and sexy and nighttime," and named it one of the x best books of the year. As passionate responses poured in from places as different equally Outside Magazine and Vogue. Oprah picked it to revive her volume club, on hiatus the previous two years. It held the No. one spot on the Times' best-seller listing for 7 weeks, was translated into 32 languages, and sold some ane.75 million copies. Reese Witherspoon optioned information technology, with the intention of both producing it and starring as Strayed. She did; the movie opens this week.

I read Wild when information technology was first published, and I have been watching its rise with surprise always since. People love to read about outdoor extremis and debacle, à la Into Sparse Air, but books about nature in which zero goes terribly incorrect exercise not commonly attract millions of fans. Moreover, there is a kernel of genuine radicalism in Wild — and radicalism, by definition, does not appeal to the mainstream. Outside of slave narratives and horror fiction, developed American literature contains very few accounts of a adult female lone in the woods. Yet Wild is the story of a woman who voluntarily takes leave of society and sustains herself outdoors, without the protection of a man, or, for that matter, of mankind. It is the story of a woman who does something physically demanding mean solar day later day, of her own gratis volition, and succeeds at information technology. It is the story of a working-class woman and her mind — of what Strayed thought about in the three months she spent almost entirely alone. And it is a story that ends happily in the near-total absence of that conventional prerequisite for happy endings, romantic dearest.

On the face of it, that kind of tale risks being unpalatable to the American ­public, never mind wildly popular. That Wild succeeded anyway is an accomplishment, and an instructive one. In a ­civilisation with profoundly ambivalent feelings virtually contained women, it is not always clear what kind of adventures nosotros will be lauded for undertaking, nor what kind of tales nosotros will be lauded for telling. And then why did so many people fall in honey with Strayed and her story?

Cheryl Strayed touches a slate-gray ring on her wrist. "My Fitbit," she says. "We're going to go our 10,000 steps." Strayed and I are heading out for a stroll in Portland, Oregon, in the kind of weather for which that city is famous: not raining, just not not-raining, and certainly not ­certainly-not-going-to-rain. Strayed is undeterred, either because she'southward lived hither for almost 2 decades, or because she once walked for 94 days in every conceivable meteorological condition, or because she really wants those 10,000 steps. She is wearing jeans and hiking boots — the lightweight kind that work for bumming around a city, or anyway around this city — and no glaze, and the Fitbit.

"I'm obsessed with it," she says of this concluding item. "I was and then glad when y'all said you wanted to walk." (I had proposed a hike, for obvious reasons, but fifty-fifty for Strayed, the weather forecast was a chip dour for that.) "My favorite thing to do when I gather with my girlfriends is to go for a walk. I'm e'er like, 'Can we go for a walk, tin we get for a walk?' and they're like, 'Let's get a potable.' I dearest to drink, don't get me incorrect, but I want to walk."

Why is "pedestrian," as an adjective, insulting? Walking is the pace nigh conducive to observation and conversation: a human step, a proficient way to call back through the earth. Strayed and I amble along, talking about her upcoming ­projects — she has sold her side by side two books, a novel and another memoir, both as yet unwritten — and about her children: a son, x, and a daughter, 9, who plays her own younger self in the moving picture. Nosotros pass the ghost of the eating house where she met her husband, a documentary filmmaker. (It closed at the outset of this year.) We pass the house where Strayed and her family lived while she was finishing Wild: a modest, pleasant, Arts-and-Crafts-style habitation whose white trim, she informs me, was purple during her tenure. We laissez passer ane of Portland's oldest cemeteries, then double back and get in. It is called the Lone Fir, but there are trees everywhere, the tombstones below similar an understory. The path is covered in the yellowish fans of ginkgo leaves. It is continuing, so far, to not rain. "I love this identify," Strayed says. "Isn't information technology beautiful?"

Strayed was born far from here, in ­fundamental Pennsylvania, the second of three children. Her father was abusive. Her female parent was hardworking, optimistic, patient with adversity, vocal and unconditional in her beloved for her kids. When Strayed was 5, the family moved to Minnesota; the side by side year, her female parent left her father. Eventually she remarried, this time to a human who doted on the family and helped build them a dwelling house in rural northern Minnesota. Strayed graduated from loftier school, went to the University of Minnesota, brutal in dear, and got married while all the same a student. Her mother, who had missed out on college education earlier in life, enrolled in college when Strayed did. She startled her daughter by earning straight A'due south, then stunned her by getting diagnosed with lung cancer. She died just 49 days later, a 45-year-old senior in ­higher, two classes shy of graduation.

Strayed herself, besides a senior at the fourth dimension, would not graduate for another six years. Devastated by her mother's death, she lost interest in her coursework. She started having affairs. One of the men she slept with got her meaning. That same homo introduced her to heroin. She and her husband got divorced. In effect, she and herself got divorced. After 4 years of increasingly destructive estrangement from the person she'd been before her female parent died, she went to an outdoors store, bought a guide to hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, and fix out to walk dorsum to life.

"Is that a tombstone that looks like a tree?" Strayed asks. It is: In the southeast corner of the cemetery, not far off the path, there's a headstone designed to resemble a stump, fabricated more than convincing by the layer of moss growing over it. "It'southward kind of chilling, isn't it?" Strayed asks. "It reminds me of The Wizard of Oz when the trees come to life." We endeavour to make out the inscription. "Here rests a woodsman of the world," Strayed reads aloud. Martin Hansen, born 1861, died we can't quite tell, nineteen-something. Only the first few words of the lines below are legible: A precious … A vocalization … A identify …

Fourth dimension works strange changes on the world. Some things grow tiresome, some abound wild, some erode past legibility. Afterward Strayed saved her life, after she told her story, afterwards that story became a best seller, strangers started request her what she would say if she could become back in time and talk to her mother. "It used to be something sentimental like, 'I love you, Mom, thanks,' " Strayed says. "Now it's like, 'Laura Dern is playing y'all in a fucking movie!'"

That would constitute a dramatic evolution in anyone'southward life, or afterlife, but Strayed downplays the impact Wild's success has had on her and her family. "I accept not inverse at all," she says, "and my life hasn't changed except in one regard, which is that I take enough coin to pay my bills for the kickoff time always."

This is an understatement, but it is one with a context: Strayed'south life had already altered so much by the time she wrote Wild that whatsoever further changes struck her as comparatively minor. Equally she describes in the volume, Strayed grew up on the economic margins. Her female parent cleaned buildings and waited tables to support the family. The leanest years ended when she remarried, merely money remained tight, and the home in rural Minnesota lacked indoor plumbing. Strayed worked from adolescence onward to put herself through college and, later, an Thou.F.A. ­program in fiction at Syracuse University.

That instruction, in turn, put Strayed into an entirely unlike universe. "I do not share the same socioeconomic course as my siblings or my stepfather," she says. "I have an entirely unlike life and world and orbit and vernacular and cultural reference points and mag subscriptions — I hateful, everything." Before Wild came out, Strayed and her husband were, in her words, "dead broke," but they each had a principal'south of fine arts. "We were the impoverished elite," she said, "and that is and so dissimilar from actually being poor." It is so unlike, in fact, that her subsequent migration to the affluent elite paled past comparison.

Still, the success of Wild has demonstrably changed Strayed's life. She bought a 2d home — a cabin in the mountains east of Portland — and has traveled all over the world; last year, she and her family unit vacationed with Oprah in Hawaii. "I attempt to tell my kids this isn't normal," Strayed says wryly. She wants to give them the experiences she didn't get to have, but she likewise wants them to know how fortunate they are — she recently gave her son a talking-to after he disparaged the schoolhouse lunches she herself grew upwards eating — and she hopes to pass on some of what she did take growing upward, such as a work ethic. "But you know," she says, "some of that, you lot can't replicate information technology. You tin't pretend yous had to spend every summer of your teenage life working at the Dairy Queen when you actually get to get to army camp in Vermont." She laughs. "They are going to accept a better life than me."

We have a name for what Strayed experienced: the American Dream. With living-wage jobs declining and course stratification increasing, that dream is ever more elusive, but Strayed is among those who achieved it. Through hard work, higher education, and very little in the fashion of exterior aid, she raised herself out of poverty and into the heart grade. Eventually, of course, she rose even higher, into the kind of glamour — text messages from Oprah — that even the American Dream can only dream of. But information technology is the basic bootstrapping from poverty to self-sufficiency that nosotros discover in Wild, and that helps make its story so automatically appealing.

I don't mean to advise that Wild is fundamentally a rags-to-riches tale. It is not. But the book succeeded in part because of the way it fits into the prevailing stories nosotros tell near iii things: about class, almost women, and about suffering. Those stories are non separable, of course. The American Dream, for instance, is a fantasy of self-reliance, merely our civilization is iffy on self-reliant women.

The way Wild handles that problem became most clear to me while watching the motion-picture show version. When Witherspoon first approached Strayed about making it, "she used actually strong language," Strayed says. "I took notes. She said, 'I promise you I will go this picture made quickly, and I will protect yous, and I volition honor y'all, and I will make this a moving-picture show that we are all proud of, and I will not turn you into some dumbass chick on the trail complaining about her muffin top.'"

Witherspoon kept those promises. Every bit the star of Wild, she is grubby, unglamorous, and convincing. Equally a producer, she delivers a pic that passes the famous Bechdel Test: At least 2 women talk to each other about something other than a man. In fact, information technology also passes a kind of Advanced Bechdel Exam: A not-crazy woman talks to herself about something other than a human being. Watching information technology, I realized that the closest analogue to Wild might be Gravity, the 2013 Alfonso Cuarón movie. In information technology, Sandra Bullock plays Ryan Stone, a scientist on a NASA infinite shuttle who must find her fashion back to Globe afterwards a debris strike destroys the shuttle and kills her colleagues. Gravity is fiction while Wild is a memoir, just both offer the experience — extraordinarily rare in popular civilisation — of watching a woman teach herself how to get from A to B under very difficult circumstances and entirely alone.

What struck me virtually, though, is the symmetry of the backstories in Wild and Gravity. Strayed sets out on her journey afterward the loss of her female parent (and husband, stepfather, father, and childhood home), Rock afterward the loss of her four-year-old daughter. (In that location is no Mr. Stone.) It is as if only the total destruction of the domestic sphere could justify a woman'south presence on such adventures. Or rather — since Strayed'due south story is not made — it is equally if that destruction were necessary in gild to secure the audition's sympathy for a woman doing something risky and alone.

Granted, men, too, sometimes seek out extreme environments in response to psychic wounds, in life as well as in literature. But for them, the wound is optional; men are gratis to undertake an adventure without needing trauma (or anything else) to legitimize it. By dissimilarity, a woman'south decision to disassemble herself from conventional gild always requires justification. Women can, of form, leave exploring for pleasure or work or intellectual curiosity or the good of humanity or just for the hell of it — but we can't count to ten before someone asks if we miss our family, or accuses us of abandoning our domestic obligations.

Equally a literary device, the destruction of the domicile front silences these concerns. But it has another advantage: It is universally familiar — not from stories about contained women simply from stories about independent children. In real life, the death of a parent is an disturbing loss. But in fiction, that death, while nominally tragic, ofttimes marks the beginning of an adventure; information technology gives the hero the freedom, and sometimes the motive, to go explore an unfamiliar land. Mowgli in the jungle, Bambi in the forest, Huck on his raft, Dorothy in Oz: For whatsoever of these adventures to transpire, the parents must first be fabricated to vanish. That is partly to stoke our sympathy for the protagonist. And it is partly because our culture believes — sanely enough — that, nether normal circumstances, children should be watched over and continue close to home.

Our culture also believes, insanely enough, that much the same applies to women. No surprise, then, that successful accounts of wayfaring women also make use of this backstory. Strayed is a canny storyteller, conscious of deep-seated narrative structures and adept at deploying them. But she is cypher if non sincere, and she did non concoct or manipulate her past to make it more compelling. She didn't take to. By terrible run a risk, the story of her life conforms to a tale nosotros all already cherish. As in that early scene in Bambi that then reliably makes viewers cry, Strayed loses her female parent in terrible way, and that loss leaves u.s.a. rooting for her as she strikes out alone through the wood.

The yr afterward Strayed backpacked the Pacific Crest Trail, the author Bill Bryson backpacked the Appalachian Trail, the Pct'south East Declension analogue. In A Walk in the Wood, his 1998 book about that experience, he discusses, amidst other things, the history of the U.South. Forest Service, strategies for ­surviving a bear assault, violence against women in the outdoors, and the touch on the wilderness of logging, agriculture, invasive species, and climate change.

Nothing like this appears in Wild. The book contains nearly no ecology, botany, geology, or natural history, and Strayed makes little try to depict in whatsoever other terms the wilderness that, for iii months, served as her dwelling. This is not for want of bent. When she does choose to focus on her environs, Strayed tin be original and astute. A conduct on the trail is "equally large as a fridge." A llama she happens upon "smelled like burlap and morning breath." A lizard on a rock "seemed to be doing push-ups. 'Hello, cadger, I said.'" That is just correct, both descriptively and emotionally: Somehow, all the adept and surprising things in the wilderness telephone call forth an instinct to greet them.

But, that lizard aside, Strayed is not in the concern of introducing herself or her readers to the outdoors. When she was writing the book, she says, "my editor would always come dorsum to me and say, 'I desire to see this, what are the plants, what does it look like?' And I'd be like, 'It's simply, you know, wilderness, okay?'"

Every bit a genre, writing about the wilderness — nature writing — is a relatively recent miracle. It emerged, counterintuitively, during the Industrial Revolution, when everything virtually the rural past became an object of nostalgic interest, and nature came under threat for the first time in history. In response, people started forming a new ready of relations with the natural world. Masses of apprentice scientists began to observe, collect, and taxonomize information technology; proto-environmentalists began to audio the warning virtually it; and Romantics began to romanticize it. Nature writing as we understand it today reflects, in varying degrees, all 3 of those traditions.

Strayed came to this body of work late — subsequently she wrote Wild — and she does not identify with it. "Information technology's this educated white guy who spends a lot of time roaming effectually his backdrop," she says, "plus normally a pretty intellectual, dry way of writing most the natural world. And we very seldom hear anything near the interior life."

That last charge is non entirely fair (John Muir: "Going out, I found, was really going in"), and the centre ane is a matter of taste. But the outset 1 is inarguable. For a long time, most nature writers were wealthy white property owners, and walking alone outdoors was not an option for women. (Men get to exist flâneurs, those peripatetic observers of urban life, but a adult female walking the streets has a notably different connotation. And the reputation of women in the woods is scarcely ameliorate — the most famous examples being, afterward all, witches.) Moreover, women were not regarded as credible chroniclers of their environment, a condition extended automatically to educated white men. "The authoritative voice that white men of privilege have causeless, and have also been granted — that is the difference between their voice and mine," Strayed says. "I make no attempt to exist the authority."

Instead, Strayed belongs to a dissimilar and more demotic group of people who walk endless miles outside and alone. These are the religious pilgrims: the Muslim walking to Mecca, the Buddhist to Bodh Gaya, the Hindu to Puri, the Cosmic to Lourdes. (Aboriginal Jews made pilgrimages to the Temple at Jerusalem, but that was destroyed 2,000 years agone. More modern Jews do not traditionally walk, possibly because, traditionally, we flee. This could be a generalizable truth: People in diaspora stay put when they can.) Religious pilgrims walk outdoors, only their fundamental journey is inward, undertaken to improve the state of their soul. So, as well, with Strayed. The subtitle of Bill Bryson's book is Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. The subtitle of hers is From Lost to Plant on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Like Dante, then, Strayed is on a spiritual journey, beginning in damnation, bound for deliverance. That makes Wild a redemption narrative — and that, in plough, helps explain its popularity, because redemption narratives are some of the oldest, virtually compelling, and nigh ubiquitous stories we have. We enshrine nature writing in the canon — you were probably assigned Thoreau and Emerson et al. in loftier school — but information technology is redemption narratives that dominate our culture. Among other things, you can hear them in religious services all beyond the country and in AA meetings every day of the week.

Wild embodies this aboriginal story. Or, more precisely, it embodies the contemporary American version thereof, where the course is not from sin to salvation simply from trauma to transformation: I was abject, dysfunctional, and emotionally shattered, simply at present I see. This version has more train-wreck allure than the traditional one (existence a mess is mostly more than spectacular than but being an unbeliever), and it is also more inclusive. Identifying with it requires no particular faith, beyond the faith that a bad life can become meliorate.

The American redemption narrative, then, is entertaining, accessible, and privately comforting. And, in the case of Wild, information technology is culturally comforting too. Earlier Strayed sets off on her journey, she embodies much of what America fears about young lower-class women: She does drugs, sleeps around, gets an abortion. Eleven hundred miles and 315 pages later, she has sobered upwards, sworn off the one-night stands, and become as wholesome and appealing as the girl next door.

Now, intentionally or otherwise, Strayed is in the business organisation of telling other people that their lives, too, tin be redeemed. As "Dear Sugar," the communication columnist, she acquired a throng of impassioned followers who devoured and discussed her every line. Uncharacteristically, for an internet forum, the dominant tone was identification ("Someone finally gets me"), illumination ("I finally get it"), and gratitude bordering on reverence. In the introduction to Tiny Beautiful Things, a 2012 collection of Strayed'due south columns, the writer Steve Almond noted that "people come to her in real pain and she ministers to them." Fifty-fifty the course of those columns — question, anecdote, ­illumination, benediction — owes more than to the homiletic tradition than to Ann Landers. Somewhere along the line, the secular ­pilgrim turned into a secular priest.

Wild is not a volume of advice, but information technology was received in much this same spirit. Its readership has surpassed not just that of her last volume just that of books, menses — "All these people who don't even read have read Wild," Strayed says — and fans show up at her events in a fervor to meet her. "I never imagined Wild would be read as inspirational," Strayed says — never mind that her writing had been described every bit such for two years earlier the memoir came out. "But information technology's the No. 1 thing people say to me now: 'I was and so inspired by your volume.'"

Strayed attributes this reaction to having captured, in Wild, something shared and profound: "Non merely pregnant for my own life, but also universal meaning." In other words, like the masculine nature writers she rejects, Strayed lays claim to universal truths. The distinction is that old familiar one: They assert the facts of the outer globe, she of the inner one. To write Wild, Strayed says, she had to determine "what'southward deeply true almost my experience of grief, my feel of journey, my feel of solitude, my experience of reckless beliefs. Once you get to that, when you really tell the truth, you're really speaking a universal language. I really believe that." So many people dismiss memoirs equally egotistic — and they are, she says, "if they stop at the surface truth. But if you go into that deep truth, you aren't talking almost yourself. Yous are talking about what information technology is to be human."

In John Bunyan'south The Pilgrim's Progress, published in 1678, a young man named Christian leaves the City of Destruction and sets out on a journey. His travels take him across the Slough of Despond, upwardly Colina Difficulty, through the Valley of Humiliation — and so on, until finally he crosses the River of Death and is welcomed in Celestial Metropolis.

Strayed's experience on the Pacific Crest Trail was non allegorical. If Fitbits had existed at the fourth dimension, she would have logged something on the order of 2.2 million steps. And nevertheless her concrete journey sometimes disappears under the metaphorical load it must comport, so perfectly is information technology matched to the spiritual one, and so seldom is the outer world shown to u.s.a. on any other terms. Her passage begins in the desert and ends at the Bridge of the Gods; she writes, of her backpack, that "I'd come to accept that it was my burden to bear." Similar Strayed's last name — which she bestowed upon herself after her mother'southward death and the dissolution of her first marriage — her journey can feel, at times, a little too apt, a little too laden with meaning.

Wild, in short, is not a subtle book. Strayed is like a confessional Nick Adams; she vanishes into the woods not to avoid saying anything simply in order to say everything. Her most telling stylistic tic is the unmarried-line paragraph, which serves to return portentous whatever sentiment is at hand. (During her second day on the trail: "I was in entirely new terrain." Afterward rereading a favorite work by Adrienne Rich: "It was a poem called 'Power.' ") Fifty-fifty her negative statements tin can take a strangely uplifted attribute. The line "God was a ruthless bowwow" seems to go far already anticipating its audition reaction: Right on, sister, you go, girl, amen. Her virtually famous line, "Write like a motherfucker," from one of her "Dear Sugar" columns, has go an informal motto among her fans. You can get information technology emblazoned on coffee mugs and T-shirts.

This emotional cheerleading is surely another reason for Strayed's popular success. Life itself is none likewise subtle sometimes either — try grief — and our culture has never lacked the ambition for fighting sentiment with sentiment. Strayed, who is smart and blunt and funny, wields it better than well-nigh. But 1 human being'southward cure is another human's poisonous substance, and I constitute myself put off by the overtly inspirational aspects of Wild.

But I likewise found that they made me think of something Strayed wrote about her mother. "She was optimistic to an annoying degree," she fumes at i bespeak, "given to saying those stupid things: We're non poor because we're rich in love! or When one door closes, another one opens upwards! Which ever, for a reason I couldn't quite pin down, made me want to throttle her, even when she was dying."

Anyone who has ever been driven irrationally batty by some benign quirk of a mother will place with that passage. But what struck me nearly about it is that Strayed has done what then many of us do: unwittingly became a version of her mother, correct down to the qualities that irked her. When I mentioned that she was lucky to have had such a positive experience with the picture show version of Wild, she said, "I find that when I'chiliad vulnerable, when I take risks emotionally, when I make up one's mind to have an open stance instead of a closed stance, when I offer my hands instead of shut them into fists, good things come." Perchance this would annoy Strayed'due south girl. Certainly on the page it would have annoyed me. But in person, I was struck only by how admittedly sincere she was; and also past the fact that she had a betoken.

And, finally, I was struck by how Strayed had get her mother in another way. As nosotros were walking through the cemetery, she told me that she does not believe in God in whatever conventional sense. Instead, her organized religion amounts to a radical credence of the earth as it is. "The divinity in life is most non just grace, not just beauty, not only nativity," she said, "simply also all the ugly, gnarly, brutal, ruthless things."

That might be a theology, just it sounds like something else: female parent dear. To have life unconditionally, to be undeterred by whatsoever amount of sorrow it might bring your way, to cherish information technology and discover it worthy even at its most difficult and roughshod: Thus do parents, in the ideal, beloved their children. Thus did Strayed'due south female parent dear her.

Wild succeeded in part because it channels then many of our oldest and nigh broadly shared stories. Strayed is an orphan cast out into the world; she is a bootstrapper lifting herself out of poverty; she is a pilgrim walking to salvation; she is even a pioneer, going West to grow up with the land. Just her book'due south deepest power might come from a dissimilar and fifty-fifty more time-honored journeying: that of a daughter becoming a mother — in this case, implicitly, to usa all. The journeying Strayed recounts in Wild culminates when she learns to love herself as her female parent no longer can. And that kind of love — improvident, unwavering, undiminishable — is what she offers to her readers, and urges united states to detect in ourselves.

*This article appears in the December 1, 2014 upshot of New York Magazine.

Talking to Cheryl Strayed Nigh Why Wild Works