"Wild" by Cheryl Strayed

 A journey along the mountaintops of the Pacific Crest Trail doubles as a journey from lost to found for a daughter grieving for her mother, whose death caused the whole family to disintegrate, including Cheryl's own divorce after a period of drug-fuelled promiscuity.  This biographical travel book is written by the author of the brilliant autobiographical novel Torch. 

Those of us who have done a little hiking will be impressed by this extreme version of the activity and will sympathise with Cheryl's struggles; I too have experienced losing toenails and a too-heavy pack but what she endured was on a whole new level.

Selected quotes:

• "My mother died fast but not all of a sudden. A slow-burning fire when flames disappear to smoke and then smoke to air." (Ch 1)
• "Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I'd often disputed. But it turned out that it didn't matter whether she was right or wrong. Both flowed out of my cupped palms." (Ch 2)
• "I felt like the pack was not so much attached to me as me to it. Like I was a building with limbs." (Ch 4)
• "Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story." (Ch 4) 
• "When Tom took my hand to shake it, I could read precisely the expression on his face. It said: 'I've got to get these fucking boots of my feet'." (Ch 7)
• "My flesh morphing into what I can only describe as a cross between tree bark and a dead chicken after it's been dipped in boiling water and plucked." (Ch 12)
• "The wind doing little more than whip the dust into swirls at my feet." (Ch 12)
• "I was a big fat idiot, yes, one who might die of dehydration and heat exhaustion, yes, but at least I was in a beautiful place" (Ch 12)
• "It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets." (Ch 13)
• "The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding." (Ch 13)
• "The ashes of her body were not what I'd expected. They weren't like ashes from a wood fire, silky and fine as sand.They were like pale pebbles mixed with a gritty gray gravel," (Ch 16)
• "I'd reached the point where if a character in one of the novels I was reading happened to be eating, I had to skip over the scene because it simply hurt too much to read about what I wanted and couldn't have." (Ch 17)

July 2022; 311 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God