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Why I’m Not Wild About ‘Wild’
Cheryl Strayed’s overrated memoir catches the romance of hiking but too often lacks credibility
In 1982 Steven Callahan spent 76 days floating on an inflatable raft in the Atlantic after his sailboat sank on a trip from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean.
A few years later, he described a risk of writing about that ordeal in the preface to his Adrift: “Of course, I can never be completely sure that all my conclusions are exactly what I felt then rather than new insights.”
That kind of honesty helped to make Adrift one of the great seafaring memoirs of the past several decades. And it’s part of what’s missing from Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (Knopf, 2012, and Vintage movie tie-in edition, 2014).
Wild purports to give an account of how, at the age of 26, Strayed hiked for more than 1100 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail from the Southern California to the Oregon-Washington Border. How faithful it is to reality we may never know.
What we know is that Wild swept in on a wave of 21st-century memoirs — like Eat Pray Love — that have portrayed the remedy for heartbreak as a trip so rigorous or expensive as to be far beyond the reach of most of the heartbroken. Neither that fact nor…
