Cheryl Strayed Hikes Her Way Through Heartbreak in Wild". Oprah.com (also, April 2012 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine). March 2012. Archived from the original on March 24, 2012. (Originally titled "Inward Bound: Hiking Her Way Through Heartbreak"). There was nothing much to say. She’d been so transparent and effu- sive and I so inquisitive that we’d already covered everything. I knew that her love for me was vaster than the ten thousand things and also the ten thousand things beyond that. I knew the names of the horses she had loved as a girl: Pal and Buddy and Bacchus. I knew she’d lost her virginity at seventeen with a boy named Mike. I knew how she met my father the next year and what he seemed like to her on their first few dates. How, when she’d broken the news of her unwed teen pregnancy to her parents, her father had dropped a spoon. I knew she loathed going to confession and also the very things that she’d confessed. Cursing and sassing off to her mom, bitching about having to set the table while her much younger sister played. Wearing dresses out the door on her way to school and then changing into the jeans she’d stashed in her bag. All through my childhood and adolescence I’d asked and asked, making her describe those scenes and more, wanting to know who said what and how, what she’d felt inside while it was going on, where so-and-so stood and what time of day it was. And she’d told me, with reluctance or relish, laughing and asking why on earth I wanted to know. I wanted to know. I couldn’t explain.

How are you feeling?” I’d coo hopefully when she woke, reaching through the tubes to smooth her flattened hair into place. Would I need it? I wondered meekly, bleakly, flopping down on the bed. It was well past dinnertime, but I was too anxious to feel hungry, my aloneness an uncomfortable thunk that filled my gut. Sexy, uplifting . . . Fierce and funny . . . Strayed hammers home her hard-won sentences like a box of nails. The cumulative welling up I experienced during Wild was partly a response to that too infrequent sight: that of a writer finding her voice, and sustaining it, right in front of your eyes. . . . Riveting.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times a b c Rehak, Melanie (March 3, 2012). "Trail of Tears". Slate. Archived from the original on March 3, 2012. I howled and howled and howled, rooting my face into her body like an animal. She’d been dead an hour. Her limbs had cooled, but her belly was still an island of warm. I pressed my face into the warmth and howled some more.

An introduction to Emily Hughes

It’s eighteen dollars for now, then,” she replied, “but if a companion joins you, you’ll have to pay more.” Who am I? we’d ask one another over and over again, playing a game in which the person who was “it” had to think of someone, famous or not, and the others would guess who it was based on an infinite number of yes or no questions: Are you a man? Are you American? Are you dead? Are you Charles Manson? This novel was gripping from the start. There was a bit of mystery to it. At times it was quite sad but also beautiful and eye-opening. It was fascinating to learn about the child raised in the wild and how she learned to adapt to her new surroundings. I couldn’t leave Minnesota. My family needed me. Who would help Leif finish growing up? Who would be there for Eddie in his loneliness? Who would make Thanksgiving dinner and carry on our family traditions? Someone had to keep what remained of our family together. And that someone had to be me. I owed at least that much to my mother.

No one can write like Cheryl Strayed. Wild is one of the most unflinching and emotionally honest books I've read in a long time. It is about forgiveness and grief and bravery and hope. It is unforgettable.” I loved the deep love between the sisters and the wild child, Alice. Reading how the three of them become a beautiful tight family tugged my heart. I also enjoy You need to get the hell out of Minneapolis,” said my friend Lisa during one of our late-night heartbreak conversations. “Come visit me in Portland,” she said. One of the most original, heartbreaking and beautiful American memoirs in years.” —Michael Schaub, National Public Radio From the room where she died I could see the great Lake Superior out her window. The biggest lake in the world, and the coldest too. To see it, I had to work. I pressed my face sideways, hard, against the glass, and I’d catch a slice of it going on forever into the horizon.But she held out against it for only one day. She slept and woke, talked and laughed. She cried from the pain. I camped out during the days with her and Eddie took the nights. Leif and Karen stayed away, making excuses that I found inexplicable and infuriating, though their absence Here you are,” I said to the woman, sliding the form across the coun- ter in her direction, though she didn’t turn to me for several moments. She was watching a small television that sat on a table behind the coun- ter. The evening news. Something about the O. J. Simpson trial. I was on the edge of my seat. . . . It is just a wild ride of a read . . . stimulating, thought-provoking, soul-enhancing.”