This book is a memoir of the author's hiking quest along the Pacific Crest Trail. At age twenty-two, the young woman had lost her mother Bobbi to cancer, who she considered to be the love of her life. Her brother, sister, and step-father essentially drifted apart to live their own lives after Bobbi passed away and was essentially the glued that held them together. Cheryl Strayed became a brief heroine addict and cheated on her husband with multiple partners to the point where her confession led to their divorce. The trip alongside the West coast is one of purging her spirit of things that had happened to her, and understanding how she ended up where she is by taking one long physically-emotionally exhausting and torturous path to do so.

Strayed provides a wonderful narrative of her life that is both broken and solid. There is a trend in Hollywood and literature that females are not considered adults, therefore have to baby up their language, sexuality, brains, and humor in order to gain the male audience. This book, along with Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (at least of recent memory), is refreshing in the sense that the female narratives are no holds barred. Cheryl needs help and doesn't know how to ask for it, sees her value through the eyes of others, and learns to equate her life by what she deems it to be. This woman had so much baggage it almost felt like you were wearing her overstuffed mountain gear along with her as she shares her experiences of cheating, her mother's death, and her family's undoing. So many of her passages emanate the loss of what she went through, and Cheryl doesn't go out of her way to glamorize her experiences or push specific spiritual lessons for the readers. It's her journey and we're along for the ride. There is no beating around the bush with her fuck-ups nor her desires or dreams, and I liked that Strayed's voice is one of that as a young adult woman's voice is; honest, frank, tormented, humorous, grateful, and enlightened.

Way back when in the early eighties when audiences saw Top Gun (starring Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer) and immediately wanted to become an Army pilot, I read this book and won't be ashamed to say that I am inspired to do something similar - to take a trip somewhere and sort myself out. It is not to replicate Cheryl's experience nor to see if trekking solo lives up to the idyllic poetic imagery this book served but more for my own sanity and thirst for adventure/self-reconciliation too. Such a major attraction to this memoir is the search for discovery through a singular experience with yourself, and not allowing obstacles in the form of addiction, broken family relationships, etc. stop you. Nature has a way of enveloping us into its arms, if we allow it do so, and Cheryl's experience is one that allows us to see the possibilities of what a trip like this can offer us - the solitude, the resolutions, the inner reckoning. Going through a ton of shit myself, I envied and was emboldened by her choice to deal with her demons in this way. To be ignited enough in her life by her mistakes, her grief of her family, and emotional pain of her past to gain a clearer understanding of who she is.

One thing should of note with this book is that Cheryl's experience is extraordinarily rare. Using guidebooks and having zero experience to actually hike, this woman completed her mission entirely underplanned. Her boots were too small. She arranged for a friend to send her care packages with twenty dollars at different rest stops; often leaving her with only a few cents in her pocket. It's easy to read this book and think that she should have been more prepared, but we are living in a different age of technology and cellphones at fingertips. I can't criticize the choices that Strayed made because who am I to do so, but I think it's a fair warning to those who might be encouraged to read this review to consider your full range of options before trying a trek of this magnitude on your own or with friends. She made plenty of friends and acquaintances along her trip that helped her but many of them are occurrences where her life truly could've been in danger. To read her journey from beginning to end, not only emotionally but physically, it's unimaginable to comprehend how she survived.

The most poignant aspects of the book is how Strayed deals with her mother's death and how it led to her abandoning herself through addictions to companionship, sexuality, drugs, and validation as a daughter. The story is as much as an adventurous trek as it is deep spiritual or personal reflection for Strayed, and to reduce the narrative to Hollywoodized ashes would be horrible as a reader, and for movie goers everywhere who are used to the "self-absorbed women struggling to find herself isolates herself from the world" ploy. Far from chick lit, or even chick flick, this book is a refreshing memoir and story of a woman who has fucked up big time and needs to reconcile all the parts of her life that has become brutally undone.

Coming to theatres in December 2014 starring Reese Witherspoon, I am so excited to see the adaptation. It's coming out on my birthday week, and I can't think of no other way of being excited to see it and go on the quest into the wild...except to plan my own excursion to take one day too.