The film’s good, but the book’s better. That’s true more often than not, and it’s definitely true of Wild.
In 1995 Cheryl Strayed set off alone to walk more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, in the western United States. She had no real hiking experience. Her mum had died of cancer a few years before. Her marriage had fallen apart, and she’d been using drugs to numb the lot.
Her pack was so heavy she couldn’t stand up with it the first time she put it on. She named it Monster. Her boots were too small, and she lost toenails along the way. It’s a messy, honest story, and that’s why it works.
She’d also changed her name. After the divorce she picked a new surname for herself, Strayed, because it described exactly where her life had gone. That tells you a lot about her honesty before you’ve turned a page.
The film came out in 2014, with Reese Witherspoon. It’s worth watching. The book gives you the part a film struggles with, which is the inside of her head over all those miles alone.
She reads on the trail, too, and burns the pages she’s finished to keep the weight down. Burning books sounds wrong to someone who reads as much as I do. Out there, it made sense. Carry what you need and let the rest go.
At heart it’s a story about finding yourself. You might have noticed I’m big on that by now.
“Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves.”
That line could have gone in my own book. Done Beats Perfect has a whole chapter on untruths, the stories we tell ourselves that we’ve started treating as facts. Strayed tells herself early on that she won’t let fear run the show out there. She has to keep choosing that, mile after mile.
There’s plenty out there to be scared of. Rattlesnakes, bears, the weather, the odd man on a lonely stretch of trail who makes her nervous. Most of the people she meets turn out to be kind, and plenty of what she dreads never happens. A lot of her fear really was a story.
In my book I asked how many of the beliefs we walk around with are actually fake. Ever catch yourself saying “I can’t do that because…” and filling in the rest? That sentence nearly always has a story hiding behind it. Strayed’s story was that she wasn’t the kind of person who could do something like this. A thousand miles later, she’d proved herself wrong.
Grief, and the bit after
We all deal with grief, we all have to heal, and we all have to find ourselves. Strayed’s grief for her mum is under every page.
My Dad died of cancer in March 1998. For years the picture I carried of him was the worst one, in intensive care, wired up to machines after emergency surgery. Every time I thought of him I saw that image.
It wasn’t until I did a timeline therapy exercise 16 years later that other details came back. Dad making jokes in his hospital bed. Dad looking out for the family, making sure we all had somewhere to sit. I could finally feel grateful for those last days, and be at peace with losing him.
Strayed had to walk a long way to make her peace. Mine took a different route. The point’s the same. Healing doesn’t happen by avoiding the thing.
Her walk ends at the Bridge of the Gods, where the trail crosses the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington. She’s 26, broke, with ruined feet, and changed. There’s no neat bow on it, just someone who has stopped running from her own life.
Finding a way out of the life you’ve got really comes down to designing the life you want. Near the end of the book she realises she’d been looking for a way out, when what she really wanted was a way in.
I made my own big change in 2014, when I decided to get sober at a Tony Robbins event. Later I went from thinking I couldn’t run to finishing 107 miles. So I know a bit about putting one foot in front of the other for longer than seems sensible.
Wild is one of the 50 in my free guide, 50 Books That Shaped Me. There are more stories in there of people finding their way back.
Watch the film if you like. Just read the book as well.
