And it is a story that ends happily in the near-total absence of that conventional prerequisite for happy endings, romantic love. 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. It is the story of a woman who does something physically demanding day after day, of her own free will, and succeeds at it. 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. Outside of slave narratives and horror fiction, adult American literature contains very few accounts of a woman alone in the woods. Moreover, there is a kernel of genuine radicalism in Wild - and radicalism, by definition, does not appeal to the mainstream. People love to read about outdoor extremis and debacle, à la Into Thin Air, but books about nature in which nothing goes terribly wrong do not normally attract millions of fans. I read Wild when it was first published, and I have been watching its ascent with surprise ever since. The Self-Help Book Women Love to Give Each Other Reese Witherspoon optioned it, with the intention of both producing it and starring as Strayed. 1 spot on the Times’ best-seller list for seven weeks, was translated into 32 languages, and sold some 1.75 million copies.

Oprah picked it to revive her book club, on hiatus the previous two years.

Equally passionate responses poured in from places as different as Outside Magazineand Vogue. The New York Times critic Dwight Garner described weeping over Wild, called it “loose and sexy and dark,” and named it one of the ten best books of the year. Then, in 2012, 17 years after she stepped back into civilization, she published a memoir about her time in the wilderness: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.īy that point, Strayed really was midway through her life, and it suddenly went a little berserk. She wrote, anonymously, “ Dear Sugar,” the cult-favorite advice column of the online literary magazine The Rumpus. Strayed wrote Torch, a semi-autobiographical novel that was quietly but kindly received. Nine days after she finished, she met a man in a Tex-Mex joint in Portland. Or a quarter-way, really: At the age of 26, motherless, divorced, dabbling in heroin, adrift from her stepfather and siblings and her own former self, Strayed made her way to California, hoisted a backpack, and set 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. Midway on her life’s journey, Cheryl Strayed found herself in dark woods. Photo: Anne Marie Fox/Courtesy of Fox Searchlight

Cheryl straight