Genre: Memoir
Length: 336 pages
Audiobook Length: 13 hours and 2 minutes
First Published: 2012
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Publisher’s Description
A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.
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. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.
Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, 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.
Quotes from Wild
I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.
I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.
The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.
I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.
Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.
Movie Trailer for Wild (2014)
About Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayed is the author of four books: her bestselling memoir, Wild; Tiny Beautiful Things; Brave Enough; and a novel, Torch. Strayed is the host of the podcast Sugar Calling and the co-host of the podcast Dear Sugars. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Visit the author’s website →
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