At 26 Cheryl Strayed walked more than 1,700km, mostly alone, along the Pacific Crest Trail, from the Mojave Desert in California to the Columbia River on the Oregon-Washington border. Her toenails fell off, killed by boots a size too small. She was baked by the sun, then frozen by the cold nights. Most of all, she was hungry, dreaming of cheeseburgers, chips and lemonade. But she made it, finally coming to terms along the way with her beloved mother’s early death. Unlike the film with Reese Witherspoon, based on Nick Hornby’s script, there are longueurs, but Strayed enlivens her memoir with affectionate descriptions of fellow pilgrims. Little of the style of her eclectic trail reading – Faulkner, Joyce, Adrienne Rich – seeps into her writing, but she is painfully honest and comes to a deep knowledge of the powerful experience of being alone in the wild.
