Wednesday, October 2, 2013

2013 read #127: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
315 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 30 to October 2
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Goddamn it. All I want is a hiking book that meets these three criteria: 1) well-written, 2) written by a person who actually hiked the entirety of the featured trail, 3) not revolving around the author's bizarre neuroses and fucked up personal life. Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods meets criteria one and three, but the whole point of the book is how hilariously unprepared Bryson was to attempt the Appalachian Trail, and his washing out is anticlimactic, a foregone conclusion. The Cactus Eaters by Dan White barely squeaks by on points one and two, but the whole book is made awkward by White's one-that-got-away nostalgia-cum-exhibitionism regarding his future ex-girlfriend. David Brill's As Far as the Eye Can See checks off two and three, with the exception of the perhaps inevitable "finding myself" narrative, but was written with all the command of lyrical English one would expect from a community college writing center.

I want a book written with the glee of a Bryson or the passion of a Muir, by someone who managed to put one foot in front of the other from end to end, without any of the emotional exhibitionism that seems to win such critical acclaim. I want to luxuriate in the trail experience without slogging through all the crap better reserved for the author's therapist. I don't think that's a lot to ask, but then, pure hiking narratives are quite the niche product, so I'm probably doomed to perpetual disappointment.

Wild is one of those special books that somehow got marketed in just the right way to accumulate baffling amounts of critical support. It was the first pick of Oprah's Book Club 2.0, FFS, with three pages of glowing blurbs fronting the paperback edition. The key thing to remember is, Wild is not a hiking narrative as I would understand it. It is a soul-baring tell-all memoir -- well-written enough, sure, but a wholly different genre altogether.

I have an empathy deficiency when it comes to people with at least one relatively normal and wholesome parent who want to complain about their childhoods. Most times, when someone whines about how their dad left them, I'm like, "Oh yeah? So? At least your mother loved you and raised you properly. Come back to me when you got a sob-story like mine, champ." At least Strayed grew up poor, so I have some sympathy for her, but still. Every chapter of the book goes into some extended recitation of all the angst and agony she went through, a spiral of pain and heroin and bad choices and therapy persisting four years -- four years -- after her mother died. I know hangups about loving, caring parents are a common thing, but I just do not understand them. It is a blank spot in my brain. I have never in my life known what it is to have a loving, caring parent. I have never as an adult understood people who go into existential crises because their parents hid something from them or got sick or died young. I lack the emotional software to grok why a grown-ass adult should base so much of their identity and self-understanding on their parents. They are separate people. Get over it. Going into a four-year spiral of self-destruction because your mom died just sounds so goddamn codependent to me. If this is an emotional deficiency in me, I can't do anything about it; I literally cannot imagine giving so much of a shit about a parent.

That's not even getting to Strayed's description of swallowing chunks of her mother's cremated remains, so that her mom would always be "with" her, which... well, it made me dry heave while reading it, which is quite an accomplishment, I guess.

All that whining about how much her mother's loss devastated her, and yet the only time I was moved to tears in this entire book was in the acknowledgments, when she concisely describes how one of her trail friends died a few years later.

I can see how, on technical grounds, this is a "good" book. It was a fast and absorbing read, even as I rolled my eyes every time Strayed broke off from her trail narrative to do yet another flashback to depict how fucked up she was before the Pacific Crest Trail finally taught her acceptance. I enjoyed her trail narrative, which was decidedly dirty and unglamorous (and all the more evocative after my own single experience with backpacking, a month or so ago). All the parts about her self-destructive spiral, though, those weren't a good fit for me.

Plus, she only walked about a thousand miles of a 2,650 mile trail, so pffft.

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