Cheryl Strayed
Author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
About the Author
Cheryl Strayed, née Nyland, was born on September 17, 1968 in Spangler, Pennsylvania. She is an American memoirist, novelist and essayist. Her second book, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail was published in the United States on March 20, 2012, and has been translated into more show more than thirty languages. It is an Oprah Book Club 2.0 choice, made the New York Times Bestseller list and was optioned for film rights by Reese Witherspoon even before it was published. The film is scheduled to be released in 2014. Strayed's first book, the novel Torch, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February 2006. She attended the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree, graduating magna cum laude with a double major in English and Women's Studies. A long-time feminist activist, Strayed served on the first board of directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Cheryl Strayed at Deadline Contenders Television at Directors Guild Of America on April 15, 2023 in Los Angeles, California
Works by Cheryl Strayed
Associated Works
Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America (2017) — Contributor — 252 copies, 10 reviews
Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present (2007) — Contributor — 219 copies, 3 reviews
Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers (1995) — Contributor — 127 copies
An Innocent Abroad: Life-Changing Trips from 35 Great Writers (2014) — Contributor — 88 copies, 4 reviews
Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives (2009) — Contributor — 71 copies, 2 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Other names
- Nyland, Cheryl (birth name)
- Birthdate
- 1968-09-17
- Gender
- female
- Education
- University of Minnesota
Syracuse University
McGregor High School
University of St Paul - Occupations
- memoirist
novelist
essayist - Organizations
- Vida: Women in Literary Arts
- Agent
- Janet Silver (Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Agency)
- Short biography
- Cheryl Strayed (born September 17, 1968) is an American memoirist, novelist, essayist and podcast host. The author of four books, her award-winning writing has been published widely in anthologies and major magazines.
Strayed's first book, the novel Torch, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February 2006 to positive critical reviews. Torch was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award and selected by The Oregonian as one of the top ten books of 2006 by writers living in the Pacific Northwest. In October 2012, Torch was re-issued by Vintage Books with a new introduction by Strayed.
Strayed's second book, the memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, was published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf on March 20, 2012. It has been translated into 30 languages. The week of its publication, Wild debuted at number 7 on the New York Times Best Seller list in hardcover non-fiction. In June 2012, Oprah Winfrey announced that Wild was her first selection for her new Oprah's Book Club 2.0. The next month Wild reached number 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, a spot it held for seven consecutive weeks. The paperback edition of Wild, published by Vintage Books in March 2013, spent 126 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. The book has also been a bestseller around the world—in the UK, Germany, Australia, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and elsewhere. Wild won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Oregon Book Award.
In July 2012, Vintage Books published Strayed's third book: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar. The book debuted in the advice and self-help category on the New York Times Best Seller list at number 5 and it has also been published internationally. Tiny Beautiful Things is a selection of Strayed's popular "Dear Sugar" advice columns, which she wrote for no pay for the literary website The Rumpus from 2010 to 2012.
Strayed's fourth book, Brave Enough, was published in the United States by Knopf on October 27, 2015, and in the United Kingdom a week later by Atlantic Books. It debuted in the advice and self-help category on the New York Times Best Seller list at number 10. - Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Spangler, Pennsylvania, USA
- Places of residence
- Portland, Oregon, USA
Chaska, Minnesota, USA
Aitkin County, Minnesota, USA - Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Discussions
Gone Girls, Found in Reading Books by Women (February 2015)
Reviews
In 1995 Cheryl Strayed's life was a mess. Still locked in grief from her mother's untimely death, she had divorced the man she loved, was messing around with heroin, sleeping around and moving from one waitressing job to another. Her family unit had collapsed without their mother as the pivot, and without a centre to ground herself around Strayed was spinning into self-destruction. By chance one day she picked up and leafed through a book on the Pacific Crest Trail in a store, and the rest, show more as they say, is history.
This is a gutsy, page-turning memoir that plucks at the heartstrings. Starting out on the trail Strayed was a total greenhorn, unfit, hapless and inexperienced for what lay ahead of her, and it is this that makes this book work and resonate with so many readers around the world. She wasn't equipped (well actually she was over-equipped in some respects and carrying too heavy a load), she wasn't prepared (emotionally or physically), yet she never quit, keeping one foot going after the other no matter how hard the going got. It's a story of grit and determination, and of a woman who had to become lost from the real world to emotionally find herself again.
5 stars - A sad, joyful and ultimately triumphant read. You'll be dusting down the hiking boots before you're done. show less
This is a gutsy, page-turning memoir that plucks at the heartstrings. Starting out on the trail Strayed was a total greenhorn, unfit, hapless and inexperienced for what lay ahead of her, and it is this that makes this book work and resonate with so many readers around the world. She wasn't equipped (well actually she was over-equipped in some respects and carrying too heavy a load), she wasn't prepared (emotionally or physically), yet she never quit, keeping one foot going after the other no matter how hard the going got. It's a story of grit and determination, and of a woman who had to become lost from the real world to emotionally find herself again.
5 stars - A sad, joyful and ultimately triumphant read. You'll be dusting down the hiking boots before you're done. show less
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed fit another challenge requirement for me, to read a collection of essays. This books knocked my socks off! Within the first few stories I went through all the moods. I was happy, sad, angered, empathetic, encouraged, and I knew I was going to fall in love with the book.
Back before Cheryl Strayed was known for her memoirs and writing, she was known simply as Dear Sugar, an anonymous advice columnist for The Rumpus. Eventually she decided to put these show more stories in a book. The biggest thing that struck me with these stories is that no matter what you're going through, Cheryl let's you feel those feelings, she gets you, she shows up for you. That doesn't mean she sugar coats her advice. That doesn't mean she gives you the easy answer. She accepts whatever you are going through, she tells you that what you're feeling isn't wrong because it's how you're feeling, but then she gives you real life advice. show less
Back before Cheryl Strayed was known for her memoirs and writing, she was known simply as Dear Sugar, an anonymous advice columnist for The Rumpus. Eventually she decided to put these show more stories in a book. The biggest thing that struck me with these stories is that no matter what you're going through, Cheryl let's you feel those feelings, she gets you, she shows up for you. That doesn't mean she sugar coats her advice. That doesn't mean she gives you the easy answer. She accepts whatever you are going through, she tells you that what you're feeling isn't wrong because it's how you're feeling, but then she gives you real life advice. show less
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail [With Earbuds] (Playaway Adult Nonfiction) by Cheryl Strayed
[b:Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found|17125767|Wild A Journey from Lost to Found|Cheryl Strayed|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1356484262s/17125767.jpg|17237712] is a masterful piece of creative non-fiction. I have a lot of things to unpack in my reaction to it, but I want to focus on the style of the writing first off. Memoirs and travelogues are difficult to write. It *seems* easy on the outside, to non-writers like myself. (or writers of very specialized kinds of texts, like show more myself.) All you have to do is to record what happened in chronological order, interspersed with some background context and personal reactions to the goings-on. This isn't the case and [a:Cheryl Strayed|155717|Cheryl Strayed|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1320771235p2/155717.jpg] does a masterful job of intertwining her memories of events and actions that formed her life into a clear narrative. It is also very difficult to write about endurance athletics. So much of the meaning or significance of a long hike like this one (and I've never hiked for more than a week at a time) or other endurance events is wrapped up in the continual exhaustion or the hour after hour of effort when uncomfortable or in outright agony. On the page the word agony doesn't register that much differently than the word discomfort. The words 100 miles and 1000 miles don't have the same distinction as hiking 100 miles and hiking 1000 miles do. Strayed captures some of that on the page. So many other writers end up telling and not showing, but Strayed manages to relate, I think, more of the impact than the vast majority of others manage.
Another thing that Strayed is a master of is a kind of radical personal openness. She tells the truth. (As far as I can tell.) She doesn't pull punches. She documents her choices and writes as to try to understand them, but she manages to keep a clear distinction between documenting the things she has done and the person she is. A perfectly accurate reading of Wile could be "irresponsible and selfish woman relies on the generosity of others while she has promiscuous sex (while married), develops a heroin habit, and then runs away to escape the consequences of her choices." All of those things happened. The sentence is factual, but Strayed, by being relentlessly honest shows us that the things she has done do not make up who she is. The statement is factual, but it missed deeper truths that Strayed is able to express. She doesn't, of course, escape the fallout of her choices. She owns them, they do not own her. She teaches us, with her openness, how to love ourselves and love others. How to do a little better at seeing the person behind the behavior. By withholding judgement on herself, she allows herself to grow out of her grief and self-destructive patterns of behavior. I don't think many will want to live like Cheryl, but many who do live like Cheryl can learn how to love and heal because Cheryl is relentlessly honest about herself. I can see how some might read Wild and come away thinking that Strayed is a special case, some will think that her trail-name "Queen of the PCT" is snarky: that she did nothing to earn her special treatment and kindness from strangers other than to be a pretty woman with too much sense of adventure and not enough common sense. That she was lucky, privileged, or entitled to walk away from risky decisions without disaster. That is, I think, incorrect. Strayed is special because she is able to document her pain and her reaction to pain, grief, and the sheer fucked-uppedness of her situation so as to give a sense of perspective to others in the same place. She was unable to pretend her life was anything but lost and a mess, but that inability to engage in pretence also left her open to the truth of love. Love is just as real as pain or grief. That allows her to tell us: "Sweetpea, you are mess AND you deserve love. You can love yourself unconditionally and that is the first step to moving on to good things." At least, that's what I hear her telling me. show less
Another thing that Strayed is a master of is a kind of radical personal openness. She tells the truth. (As far as I can tell.) She doesn't pull punches. She documents her choices and writes as to try to understand them, but she manages to keep a clear distinction between documenting the things she has done and the person she is. A perfectly accurate reading of Wile could be "irresponsible and selfish woman relies on the generosity of others while she has promiscuous sex (while married), develops a heroin habit, and then runs away to escape the consequences of her choices." All of those things happened. The sentence is factual, but Strayed, by being relentlessly honest shows us that the things she has done do not make up who she is. The statement is factual, but it missed deeper truths that Strayed is able to express. She doesn't, of course, escape the fallout of her choices. She owns them, they do not own her. She teaches us, with her openness, how to love ourselves and love others. How to do a little better at seeing the person behind the behavior. By withholding judgement on herself, she allows herself to grow out of her grief and self-destructive patterns of behavior. I don't think many will want to live like Cheryl, but many who do live like Cheryl can learn how to love and heal because Cheryl is relentlessly honest about herself. I can see how some might read Wild and come away thinking that Strayed is a special case, some will think that her trail-name "Queen of the PCT" is snarky: that she did nothing to earn her special treatment and kindness from strangers other than to be a pretty woman with too much sense of adventure and not enough common sense. That she was lucky, privileged, or entitled to walk away from risky decisions without disaster. That is, I think, incorrect. Strayed is special because she is able to document her pain and her reaction to pain, grief, and the sheer fucked-uppedness of her situation so as to give a sense of perspective to others in the same place. She was unable to pretend her life was anything but lost and a mess, but that inability to engage in pretence also left her open to the truth of love. Love is just as real as pain or grief. That allows her to tell us: "Sweetpea, you are mess AND you deserve love. You can love yourself unconditionally and that is the first step to moving on to good things." At least, that's what I hear her telling me. show less
I have an aversion to reading popular books at the moment they are popular. So it's taken this long for me to read Wild -- ten years from the date of publication. I think this is because I don't want other people's thoughts and ideas to color my reaction to a book, and in reading some of the other reviews, I see there are all kinds of reactions.
My own reactions veered from head-shaking disbelief to quizzical bewilderment to some sort of limited understanding, but with a lot of remaining show more questions.
I thought this was going to be a story about an adventure and the associated self-discovery, which it is, but I didn't expect it to also be about grief.
First, I have to say, Strayed is unflinchingly honest about herself. When her mother dies when Strayed is 22 and her mother 40-something, Strayed is assailed with pathological grief. She goes completely off the rails, abandoning her marriage, committing serial, meaningless adultery, and becoming a heroin addict. In an effort to combat all the chaos of her life, she decides to hike the Pacific Coast Trail, never mind that she's never done any serious hiking before.
(As a side note, I read The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion right after, and learned it is a documented, psychological fact, that people in deep grief often think, and act, irrationally. So there's that.)
What I found hard to understand was that Strayed seemingly does nothing but make mistakes. With her life, with her relationships, with her journey. She literally never seems to learn, and it's not because she's stupid. She just seems irrational, impulsive, and reckless. Which is fine, it's her life, but stlll. There's been a lot of lauding of her courage to take to the wilderness alone, but this decision is made as she makes all decisions, on the spur of the moment and without a lot of forethought.
Anyway, I did admire her persistence, even if it turned out to be a bit self-destructive in terms of her personal health. But again, not out of keeping with the rest of her life. And the 1000 mile hike did help/cause her to reflect, face up to her life choices so far, and (hopefully) do better in the future.
I was a little disappointed with the book, to be honest. She seemed to take some things for granted, the kindness of strangers, the fact that men are sexually attracted to her, and she to them. There's a bit of 'pretty girl privilege' happening which she seemed unaware of. Granted there were a couple of times where she encounters predatory men, so being attractive cuts both ways.
I didn't have an issue with her expressed sexuality, but I wanted her to connect the dots a little better. Understand, or at least question, why she was so drawn to men, and why she looked at them through a lens of sexual attraction (or repulsion). She only actually tells us about one sexual encounter on the trip, but it often feel as though she is objectifying the men that she meets. This kind of turned me off.
I did feel compassion for her life difficulties, her emotional pain, and the physical pain of the journey. However, much of her pain is self-inflicted, and really what needs to happen is for her to stop hurting herself. It isn't clear whether she succeeds.
She is a pretty good writer, though. show less
My own reactions veered from head-shaking disbelief to quizzical bewilderment to some sort of limited understanding, but with a lot of remaining show more questions.
I thought this was going to be a story about an adventure and the associated self-discovery, which it is, but I didn't expect it to also be about grief.
First, I have to say, Strayed is unflinchingly honest about herself. When her mother dies when Strayed is 22 and her mother 40-something, Strayed is assailed with pathological grief. She goes completely off the rails, abandoning her marriage, committing serial, meaningless adultery, and becoming a heroin addict. In an effort to combat all the chaos of her life, she decides to hike the Pacific Coast Trail, never mind that she's never done any serious hiking before.
(As a side note, I read The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion right after, and learned it is a documented, psychological fact, that people in deep grief often think, and act, irrationally. So there's that.)
What I found hard to understand was that Strayed seemingly does nothing but make mistakes. With her life, with her relationships, with her journey. She literally never seems to learn, and it's not because she's stupid. She just seems irrational, impulsive, and reckless. Which is fine, it's her life, but stlll. There's been a lot of lauding of her courage to take to the wilderness alone, but this decision is made as she makes all decisions, on the spur of the moment and without a lot of forethought.
Anyway, I did admire her persistence, even if it turned out to be a bit self-destructive in terms of her personal health. But again, not out of keeping with the rest of her life. And the 1000 mile hike did help/cause her to reflect, face up to her life choices so far, and (hopefully) do better in the future.
I was a little disappointed with the book, to be honest. She seemed to take some things for granted, the kindness of strangers, the fact that men are sexually attracted to her, and she to them. There's a bit of 'pretty girl privilege' happening which she seemed unaware of. Granted there were a couple of times where she encounters predatory men, so being attractive cuts both ways.
I didn't have an issue with her expressed sexuality, but I wanted her to connect the dots a little better. Understand, or at least question, why she was so drawn to men, and why she looked at them through a lens of sexual attraction (or repulsion). She only actually tells us about one sexual encounter on the trip, but it often feel as though she is objectifying the men that she meets. This kind of turned me off.
I did feel compassion for her life difficulties, her emotional pain, and the physical pain of the journey. However, much of her pain is self-inflicted, and really what needs to happen is for her to stop hurting herself. It isn't clear whether she succeeds.
She is a pretty good writer, though. show less
Lists
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 11
- Also by
- 15
- Members
- 13,828
- Popularity
- #1,672
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 689
- ISBNs
- 133
- Languages
- 14
- Favorited
- 11
