She needed to develop consciousness on her journey which took a while. He kept telling her to write about her hike, but she didn’t know what she would write about. Strayed met her husband eight days after her hike ended. Through the support of her ex-husband Paul, her best friend Lisa, and the many generous and exuberant characters she meets along the PCT-from the sensitive Doug to the adventurous Trina and Stacy to the indominable Three Young Bucks-Cheryl begins to realize that all the mistakes she’s made have made her into the person she is and that, perhaps, she was never in need of redemption at all-what she needed all along was to see “how wild it was to let it be.Strayed joked with the audience, “I love to make people cry.” She asked the audience if her book made anyone cry and lots of hands shot up. Cheryl’s journey begins as one in search of redemption-but soon, Cheryl begins having epiphanies about the nature of healing and redemption, the value of perseverance in the face of uncertainty, and the daunting but tamable wilderness of the human spirit.

As Cheryl’s journey unspools, she must face down danger, solitude, and the ravages of her own mind, but she also finds solace and inspiration in the kindness of the strangers she meets along the way, the beauty of the wilderness, and the realization that she is allowed to feel at home in the world-even if her mother isn’t there any longer. With an oversized, burdensome pack nicknamed Monster on her back and a too-small pair of hiking boots on her feet, Cheryl sets out from the Mojave desert to hike over 1,100 miles over nine interconnected mountain ranges all the way to the Bridge of the Gods in Cascade Locks, Oregon.

At the start of Wild, Cheryl is in her mid-twenties, freshly-divorced, and embarking on the PCT out of a desire to spend time alone in nature and reckon with the many mistakes of her young life. Her grief was uncontainable and enormous, and in attempting to dull the pain-and punish herself for not being at her mother’s side at the moment of her death-Cheryl began experimenting with reckless sex and heroin use. In the wake of her mother Bobbi’s death, Cheryl spent years pinballing around the country from place to place, both with and without her husband at the time, a man named Paul. Cheryl Strayed is a writer, advice columnist, and memoirist whose 1995 summer-long trek along the Pacific Coast Trail-or the PCT-became the basis for her breakout memoir Wild.

Wild novel cheryl strayed