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Cheryl Strayed’s Wild Is the Perfect Gift for These 4 Types of People
Bereaved after the death of her mother and recovering from a bad relationship and a flirtation with heroin, Cheryl Strayed set out to walk the entire length of the Pacific Coast Trail. Years later, she wrote a memoir about her journey: Wild, which turned into an unlikely bestseller. Now the little book that blew up is about to become the film of the season, as Reese Witherspoon steps into Strayed’s hiking boots for Wild‘s cinematic adaptation. If the trailer’s any indication, it looks to be a faithful take on Strayed’s struggle to claw her way up from her own personal rock-bottom.
Strayed’s book is the memoir to read this season, and the perfect gift for just about anybody on your list, including…
Outdoor enthusiasts
Strayed isn’t much interested in lyrical descriptions of trees. In readable, direct language, she makes you feel as if you’re there with her, struggling along the trail. She paints a vivid portrait of life along the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges, from the searing heat of the desert to the numbing cold of snow-topped peaks. It’s enough to make even the firmest of couch potatoes reconsider her suspicion of the natural world.
Dreamers
What’s so charming about Wild is that it’s not centered on, say, Bear Grylls. Our narrator is no grizzled hiking veteran. Bogged down by grief, Strayed approached this venture completely unprepared. There’s the backpack—lovingly named Monster—that weighs as much a house. The boots that are a size too small and cause our heroine’s toenails to fall off. The stove she fills with the wrong type of gasoline. And the continual lack of money. But she’s a woman with a dream who sets out and never gives up, gaining new perspective as she happens upon breathtaking starry sky after breathtaking starry sky.
Memoir lovers
Yes, Wild is about a nature trail. But Strayed takes you on her mental journey as well as her physical one. At the heart of the story are the troubles that led Strayed to this self-imposed exile. At 26 years old, she’s lost her mother to cancer, sabotaged her own marriage out of grief, practiced unhealthy sexual habits and intermittent drug use, and become so detached from the remains of her family and her former self that she’s absolutely adrift. (If that isn’t the kind of story Hollywood was built on, then I’ll eat my own hiking boot.)
People people
In a story carrying that much baggage, there are a lot of difficult moments. You will get a little teary-eyed. You will feel sadness. But you’ll also feel a continuous, uplifting delight as you encounter the cross-section of America (and the world) on full display along the trail and off. From the cast of colorful characters who help Strayed hitch from trail to towns and back—and there are lots of them—to the fellow PCT hikers with a menagerie of backstories so diverse it’ll make your head and compass spin, to the requisite droves of hippies, each and every one restores a bit more of your faith in humanity.
For anyone who has ever experienced loss or felt out of place or made a bucket list or hoped for something bigger, Wild should be the go-to gift of the season. In a story of isolation, it turns out, there’s a lot to connect with. As Strayed explains at a particular epiphany point during her wilderness trek: “I wasn’t crying because I was happy. I wasn’t crying because I was sad…I was crying because I was full.”
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