Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found

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Leahy, Anna (February 27, 2019). "The Enduring Appeal of Cancer Lit". Los Angeles Review of Books. Archived from the original on March 7, 2019.

I was her daughter, but more. I was Karen, Cheryl, Leif. Karen Cheryl Leif. KarenCherylLeif. Our names blurred into one in my mother’s mouth all my life. She whispered it and hollered it, hissed it and crooned it. We were her kids, her comrades, the end of her and the beginning. We took turns riding shotgun with her in the car. “Do I love you this much?” she’d ask us, holding her hands six inches apart. “No,” we’d say, with sly smiles. “Do I love you this much?” she’d ask again, and on and on and on, each time moving her hands farther apart. But she would never get there, no matter how wide she stretched her arms. The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching’s universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve. Spectacular . . . Gripping . . . A breathtaking adventure tale and a profound meditation on the nature of grief and survival . . . A literary and human triumph.”We were sent to the pharmacy to wait. I sat between my mother and Eddie in my green pantsuit, the green bow miraculously still in my hair. There was a big bald boy in an old man’s lap. There was a woman who had an arm that swung wildly from the elbow. She held it stiffly with the other hand, trying to calm it. She waited. We waited. There was a beautiful dark-haired woman who sat in a wheelchair. She wore a purple hat and a handful of diamond rings. We could not take our eyes off her. She spoke in Spanish to the people gathered around her, her family and perhaps her husband. Just for a minute,” said my mother, almost collapsing into one, her eyes meeting mine before Eddie wheeled her toward the elevator. Kin, John (April 12, 2013). "2013 Oregon Book Awards Winners Announced". OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting). Archived from the original on September 15, 2014. It’s eighteen dollars,” said the old woman who stood behind the counter. With rude emphasis, she looked past me, out the glass door through which I’d entered moments before. “Unless you’ve got a com- panion. It’s more for two.”

the surface of me like a bruise. The real me was beneath that, pulsing under all the things I used to think I knew. How I’d finish my BA in June and a couple of months later, off we’d go. How we’d rent an apartment in the East Village or Park Slope—places I’d only imagined and read about. How I’d wear funky ponchos with adorable knitted hats and cool boots while becoming a writer in the same romantic, down-and-out way that so many of my literary heroes and heroines had. All that day of the green pantsuit, as I accompanied my mother and stepfather, Eddie, from floor to floor of the Mayo Clinic while my mother went from one test to another, a prayer marched through my head, though prayer is not the right word to describe that march. I wasn’t humble before God. I didn’t even believe in God. My prayer was not: Please, God, take mercy on us.I couldn’t leave Minnesota. My family needed me. Who would help Leif finish growing up? Who would be there for Eddie in his loneliness? Who would make Thanksgiving dinner and carry on our family traditions? Someone had to keep what remained of our family together. And that someone had to be me. I owed at least that much to my mother. a b c Shapiro, Dani (March 30, 2012). "The High Road / 'Wild,' a Hiking Memoir by Cheryl Strayed". The New York Times. Archived from the original on January 13, 2014. I scrubbed the floors. I took everything from the cupboards and put new paper down. My mother slept and moaned and counted and swallowed her pills. On good days she sat in a chair and talked to me. You finally got what you wanted,” Paul had said when we bade each other goodbye in Minneapolis ten days before.

I cooked food that my mother tried to eat, but rarely could she eat. She’d think she was hungry and then she’d sit like a prisoner staring down at the food on her plate. “It looks good,” she’d say. “I think I’ll be able to eat it later.” The staying and doing it, in spite of everything. In spite of the bears and the rattlesnakes and the scat of the mountain lions I never saw; the blisters and scabs and scrapes and lacerations. The exhaustion and the deprivation; the cold and the heat; the monotony and the pain; the thirst and the hunger; the glory and the ghosts that haunted me as I hikedbeleven hundred miles from the Mojave Desert to the state of Washington by myself. Honey,” she said eventually, gazing at me, her hand reaching to stroke the top of my head. It was a word she used often throughout my childhood, delivered in a highly specific tone. This is not the way I wanted it to be, that single honey said, but it was the way it was. It was this very acceptance of suffering that annoyed me most about my mom, her unending optimism and cheer. You need to get the hell out of Minneapolis,” said my friend Lisa during one of our late-night heartbreak conversations. “Come visit me in Portland,” she said. This isn’t Cinderella in hiking boots, it’s a woman coming out of heartbreak, darkness and bad decisions with a clear view of where she has been.” — The Seattle TimesApril 2013: For Wild, Strayed received the Reader's Choice Award in the 2013 Oregon Book Awards. [9] No one can write like Cheryl Strayed. Wild is one of the most unflinching and emotionally honest books I've read in a long time. It is about forgiveness and grief and bravery and hope. It is unforgettable.” We played it while planting and maintaining a garden that would sustain us through the winter in soil that had been left to its own devices throughout millennia, and while making steady progress on the con- struction of the house we were building on the other side of our property and hoped to complete by summer’s end. We were swarmed by mosqui- toes as we worked, but my mother forbade us to use DEET or any other such brain-destroying, earth-polluting, future-progeny-harming chemical. Instead, she instructed us to slather our bodies with pennyroyal or peppermint oil. In the evenings, we would make a game of counting the bites on our bodies by candlelight. The numbers would be seventy-nine, eighty-six, one hundred and three. Hallett, Alison (2012-03-15). "Cheryl Strayed's Wild Optioned by Reese Witherspoon | Blogtown, PDX". Blogtown.portlandmercury.com. archive.

Scott, A. O. (December 2, 2014). "Walking With Solitude, and Her Baggage / 'Wild' Stars Reese Witherspoon". The New York Times. Archived from the original on December 9, 2014.

There was nothing much to say. She’d been so transparent and effu- sive and I so inquisitive that we’d already covered everything. I knew that her love for me was vaster than the ten thousand things and also the ten thousand things beyond that. I knew the names of the horses she had loved as a girl: Pal and Buddy and Bacchus. I knew she’d lost her virginity at seventeen with a boy named Mike. I knew how she met my father the next year and what he seemed like to her on their first few dates. How, when she’d broken the news of her unwed teen pregnancy to her parents, her father had dropped a spoon. I knew she loathed going to confession and also the very things that she’d confessed. Cursing and sassing off to her mom, bitching about having to set the table while her much younger sister played. Wearing dresses out the door on her way to school and then changing into the jeans she’d stashed in her bag. All through my childhood and adolescence I’d asked and asked, making her describe those scenes and more, wanting to know who said what and how, what she’d felt inside while it was going on, where so-and-so stood and what time of day it was. And she’d told me, with reluctance or relish, laughing and asking why on earth I wanted to know. I wanted to know. I couldn’t explain.