I like to read in coffee shops, and I began to receive concerned glances from matronly women, the kind of looks that said, “Oh, honey.” It was a humiliation. I was reduced, during her book’s final third, to puddle-eyed cretinism. Turning pages, I’m practically Steve McQueen.Ĭheryl Strayed’s new memoir, “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” however, pretty much obliterated me. Luckily, perhaps, books don’t make me cry very often - I’m a thrice-a-year man, at best. Yet for a book critic tears are an occupational hazard. Even remembering it makes my heart race and my ears ring.It’s not very manly, the topic of weeping while reading. So we all clutched onto each other and went across the bridge. And yet it was late enough in the day that turning back was an equally bad idea because we wouldn’t make it out of the wildernessīefore dark. If we slipped and fell, we would surely die. There was no question that it was a very bad idea to cross this bridge, especially with two small children. Walk on this treacherous log bridge that was precariously placed far above the boulder-strewn river. About a mile from the end of the loop we came to a river and the only way to get across it was to It was one of those hikes where it looked easier on the map than it turned out to be.

A couple summers ago the four of us hiked a six-mile loop trail in the Willamette National Forest not far from Now that I have two small children, my husband and I are discreetly training them to be future backpackers. But that’s how I pictured it in my mind and so I reproduced it for you on the page. Really blow that man’s hair across his face the moment he asked me that question? Maybe. Of course there are a million instances that I brought to life by using the skills of a storyteller, as memoirists do - did the wind I didn’t write anything that didn’t happen the way I remember it happening, and yet I’m fairlyĬertain there are things that others would remember slightly differently.

The truth piece of that, I also firmly plant that truth within the context of my own subjectivity. Memoir is the art of subjective truth, and while I feel a strong obligation to Them to share their memories of the time we spent together, but most of all I relied on my memory of what happened and how it felt.

In some cases, I tracked down people I met on the trail and asked Having that document allowed me to correct, corroborate, or expand things I remembered. That journal was incredibly helpful to me as I wrote “Wild.” I recorded many detailsĪnd snippets of dialogue that would otherwise have been lost. I was an avid journaler all through my twenties and I wrote in my journal every day of my hike, sometimes twice a day.

Cheryl strayed hobo times