Both women are adventuresome, open to new friendships, and both have mastered the art of making much of their extended trips.īut there are also notable differences. Like Gilbert, Strayed is unabashedly spiritual, addressing not God or a guru but "the universe" as she seeks to heal the hole in her heart. In its story arc, "Wild" bears some similarity to "Eat, Pray, Love." Emotionally shredded by a divorce from a man to whom she was unfaithful, sad but not sorry, a woman sets off on a pilgrimage with a murky goal of finding herself. More recently, Elizabeth Gilbert's astronomically successful "Eat, Pray, Love" spawned many copycat journeys and books. Going back to Thoreau, some of our best-loved writers have found value in removing themselves from society, seeking refuge in nature or on the road. Knopf 315 pages $25.95)Ĭheryl Strayed's "Wild," the remarkable memoir of her summer spent hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, is a very American story. But both are better without explicit fishing for significance.By Cheryl Strayed ( Alfred A. Often, I didn’t know exactly what they meant, yet there was another way in which I knew their meaning entirely, as if it were all before me and yet out of my grasp, their meaning like a fish just beneath the surface of the water that I tried to catch with my bare hands-so close and present and belonging to me-until I reached for it and it flashed away. For comparison’s sake, here Strayed describes her favorite lines from Adrienne Rich: (Crowned “Queen of the PCT” because strangers keep giving her things, Strayed is like a modern-day Lana Burc h: an outcast who receives the world’s kindness at almost every turn.) But the film’s last-minute need to wrap up its lessons in shiny ribbon contradicts its own emphasis on the messiness and irreducible mystery of life. Sure, hope and naiveté are part of her character. These lines, airlifted in from a long passage near the memoir’s close, abandon the film’s prior subtlety to partake in book-Cheryl’s only real flaw: overdoing it.
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