Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed is an American memoirist whose Wild recounts a solo thousand-mile hike taken at her lowest point — a raw, searching account of grief, recklessness, and recovery.

Cheryl Strayed was in her mid-twenties, reeling from her mother’s death and the collapse of her marriage, when she decided on impulse to hike the Pacific Crest Trail — over a thousand miles from the Mojave Desert to the Oregon-Washington border — alone and almost entirely unprepared. Wild, published in 2012, is the account of that journey. It alternates between the physical ordeal of the trail and the emotional backstory that brought her there: grief, addiction, infidelity, and a profound loss of direction.

What makes Wild more than a hiking memoir is Strayed’s willingness to implicate herself fully. She does not present a redemptive arc in which the trail cleanses a passive victim; she shows a young woman who made a genuine mess of her life and who is trying, imperfectly, to find her way back to herself. The prose is direct and emotionally unguarded, and while some readers find her voice self-indulgent, others find that honesty the book’s greatest strength. Strayed earned her redemption narrative by not softening the reasons she needed one.

Wild’s success — including the 2014 film adaptation starring Reese Witherspoon — introduced a wide audience to the PCT and to the genre of women’s outdoor narrative. Strayed also became widely known for her Dear Sugar advice column. Whether or not readers connect with her particular story, her commitment to truthful, unsentimental self-examination makes Wild one of the more honest memoirs of its era.