Bestselling author Cheryl Strayed is coming to Squaw Valley on Jan. 13 to lecture on her book, “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.”
The book is the story of Strayed’s 1,100-mile solo journey from the Mojave Desert to the state of Washington, a trek she undertook along the PCT almost 20 years ago at the age of 26. As she admits in the early pages of the book, she had no idea just how difficult the journey would be. But physical challenges aside (and there were many), it was the death of her mother to cancer just a few years before that tugged at her emotionally and takes center stage in the book that would be published 18 years later, when Strayed herself was a mother.
“And finally, once I’d actually gone and done it, walked all those miles for all those days, there was the realization that what I’d thought was the beginning had not really been the beginning at all,” she writes in the first chapter. “That in truth my hike on the Pacific Crest Trail hadn’t begun when I made the snap decision to do it. It had begun before I even imagined it, precisely four years, seven months, and three days before, when I’d stood in a little room at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and learned that my mother was going to die.”
The book goes on to recount the painful months leading up to the death of her mother, a woman whose optimism was invincible even in the face of the poverty that characterized Strayed’s young life. Her mother worked in a factory that made plastic containers, and she would bring the rejects home. Strayed wrote:
“We made them into toys — beds for our dolls, ramps for our cars. She worked and worked and worked, and still, we were poor. We received government cheese and powdered milk, food stamps and medical assistance cards, and free presents from do-gooders at Christmastime. We played tag and red light green light and charades by the apartment mailboxes that you could only open with a key, waiting for the checks to arrive. ‘We aren’t poor,’ my mother said, again and again. ‘Because we’re rich in love.’ She would mix food coloring into sugar water and pretend with us that it was a special drink.”
In her teen years, Strayed’s family moved to a Minnesota house built of logs and plywood with no running water or electricity. No stranger to adversity, Strayed writes powerfully about the physical challenges of her journey, but it is the prose about her mother, passages told from the perspective of a grown woman reflecting back on what she could not have understood as a child, and reflecting alone — unable to reach out to call her mother and tell her all she’d learned — that really tug at the heart strings.
Knopf published “Wild” last March. Three months later, Oprah revived her popular book club and chose Strayed’s book as her first reading selection for the newly incarnated Oprah 2.0. It was a stroke of fortune that catapulted Strayed into the national spotlight, and she soon hit the New York Times bestseller list, climbing to the top nonfiction hardcover spot by the middle of July.
A photomontage of Strayed’s life, along with interviews and story selections, can be found on Oprah.com. The popular website offers many telling details about the author, including her love for reading that inspired her to pack on her journey a pile of books amid her food and camping equipment, classics like James Joyce’s “Dubliners,” which she would burn, page-by-page, as she read them to “lighten her load.”
Strayed lives in Oregon with her husband and two children. She will be available for book signings after the lecture, which is being hosted by the Squaw Valley Institute.
