Book review: "Wild" by Cheryl Strayed

This book has been reviewed by many in the past several weeks.  It has been called stunning, spectacular, smart, funny, wise, often sublime.  On and on.  Every reviewer mentions the author's dalliance with heroin, as if that is a crucial fact that frames part of the book.  Every reviewer applauds the author's gutsy triumph over a crappy, self-destructive period in her life.  I have yet to read a negative review, even a teeny bit negative.  Is that because we must admire someone who overcomes adversity, walks 1,100 miles on the Pacific Coast Trail and finally is able to put her dead mother to rest and her past behind her?  Is her self-absorbed nature acceptable because she had a fucked up life? 

But I am being too harsh.  It's a good book.  When Cheryl Strayed writes about her mother's life and death, especially the death, the memoir is tear-jerkingly good.  Her reaction to that death set off a spiral of self-destructive behavior, fairly common in young twenty-year-old adults.  Her decision to tackle the Pacific Coast Trail seems rather rash, and she admits it was, but she was determined to do it, no matter how difficult, awful, exhilarating and humbling it turned out to be. 

And yet, there is the same low-level hum of "me, me, me" that many memoirs seem to have.  Now, of course a memoir is about "me, me, me" but some writers are able to get themselves out of the way and make their lives interesting despite themselves.  Others, like Cheryl Strayed, want their life story to be heard because they think their terrible lives were more terrible than any one else and gosh, look what they had to overcome: Death!  Poverty!  A mean father!  Recreational drug use!  Again, I am being a bit mean about this and I did admire her guts to simply go out and do it.  

This is the third book about hiking the PCT I have read in the past two years.  (Do we detect a pattern here?)  The narrative about the hike itself is captivating for about 100 pages, and then it begins to be tiresome, much like the hike itself, as she readily admits.  Oddly, her descriptions of and dialogues with the people she meets on the trail range from fascinating to childishly new-best-friend-like.  But then I have to remind myself, she did this hike when she was 26 and maybe that's how a 26 year old would feel.  (Too many years have gone by for me, I can't remember how I felt 5 years ago let alone 36.)  Even though she waited more than fifteen years to write this story, Strayed still manages to capture what was probably her youthful exuberance at that time and we all know that exuberance is often mercurial and child-like.

Bottom line, I liked the book, although I did speed read at least 100 pages, just to get through the here's-another-terrible-hiking-episode part of it.  As I said, the passages about her mother and siblings were exceptional, more than enough to make the journey along the trail worth taking with her.

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