Interview: Cheryl Strayed
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Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, a memoir of the author’s solo trek up the West Coast’s Pacific Crest Trail, is not a typical nature narrative. Of course, the conflict of woman versus the outdoors is present, but Strayed had faced more than her fair share of challenges before ever setting foot on the trail. By the age of 26, she’d lost both her mother and her marriage. Unmoored, she’d found her way fromMinnesota toPortland, where a new lover introduced her to heroin. For many, the story would end — or at least take a lengthy plummet — here. Instead, months later, Strayed was clean and hiking solo for 1100 miles up the PCT, from the Mojave Desert to WashingtonState.
Strayed, who many now know as the author of the Rumpus’s Dear Sugar advice column, spoke with eMusic’s Jess Sauer about solitude, music starvation and the familiar pain of writing.
Do you think the transformation you experienced through your journey was inevitable? If you had not hiked the PCT, do you think you’d have had a similar experience elsewhere? Or do you think, if you hadn’t done it, you might never have learned the lessons you learned?
In some ways, I think both things are true. But I would say the truest thing is, yeah, I do think that I would have grown in these ways, I would have had transformations. I think what it is, is that the PCT made that experience deeper, and maybe in some ways, faster. I stepped out of my life and did this thing that was challenging, that forced me to be alone, that forced me to accept things on a really ground level. I had to walk, even though my feet hurt. Things like that. I think it just sped up what I would have inevitably learned and experienced along the trail. But, you know, maybe not. That’s the mystery, isn’t it? You can’t rewind and say, “What would my life be like?” It wasn’t like before I hiked the trail I was an unwise person. I always was a seeker, you know? I would have sought that out, but I do think that the trail gave me a deeper sense of those things.
Have you made any similar trips since then?
Not like that, no. I’ve certainly gone backpacking for a week or two at a time, but nothing on this scale. It’s a pretty big undertaking. A lot of people want to do it, but they can’t quit their job, or they have kids. I have kids now; I couldn’t just do that, you know? But I did it at the right moment.
You wrote journals the entire time you were on this trek. How heavily did you borrow from them, and how much did your voice change between the journals and the memoir?
If you read my journals, you might be able to say, “Oh yeah, that’s Cheryl’s voice.” When I was keeping those journals, first of all, they’re different than the way you craft a story. The way I’d write in my journals, sometimes I’d actually write scenes. I’d meet people, and I’d put what they said as dialogue. But usually, you know, the journal voice is much more like reportage. “I met so-and-so today, we did this, I walked this many miles.” So I drew on the journals for information, but not for the voice. The voice of the book is my writer’s voice, the voice I write with always in everything I write. The journal was helpful for details, like the content of the hobo care package. I’d recorded that in my journal, all of the things that were in there. I would have remembered most of it, but not all of it. For example, that paragraph was probably right there in my journal, and I was able to use it for my book, but most of the time, it was like, “Okay, this is the day, I was here at this place,” and then I crafted the story around that for the book.
You know how some books are written like a journal? I knew I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to do, like, “Day One…”
In the book, a lot of people ask what your mother would think of you hiking. As a mother, would you want your kids to have the same experience?
That’s always hard, because it’s like there’s this one impulse, as a mother, where I don’t want my kids to have to do anything that would be difficult. Like, they can’t ever fall in love, because their hearts will be broken, which is of course ridiculous. My real feeling about my kids is yeah, absolutely. I can’t think of anything that would be better for them to do than hike the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s really a wonderful growth experience at any time in any life. Absolutely I would want for them to do it. I would worry about them, but I would want them to do it.
Do you think you would make them take their cell phones?
Yeah, see, that’s the hard thing about technology. Once the world changes, it’s hard. I don’t know. For example, email is kind of the bane of my life, and I think a lot of people would agree. We’re overrun by too much email, we’re too connected. And yet we can’t disconnect ourselves somehow. To do that would be stepping out of the flow of the culture. Yeah, I would probably have them take their cell phones, but I would also advise them to maybe just turn them on occasionally, because I do think that silence and solitude — you’re not really alone if you’re walking along tweeting. I would be walking out there and I would think about friends, and they would be far away, and there was no contact.
It seems like the asceticism of being on the trail made you so appreciative, for instance when you hitchhiked and the people who picked you up played Stevie Ray Vaughan for you. It seemed like an almost holy experience that wouldn’t exist if you’d had an iPod you could just listen to.
No, it wouldn’t have. That was one of the surprises of the trail. Obviously, I knew I loved music, but I didn’t realize how starved I would be for music, how much it would really pain me. I was always singing songs in my head. It was like kind of getting to listen to the song, I could kind of play it in my head. Then, yeah, when I was in that car, it was on par with someone giving me a meal, you know?
It seems like that solitude was a huge part of what was so instructive about your experience.
Yeah, I think so. I think being alone was really important. It’s hard to hike the trail even with a companion, because you still have to carry your own pack and bear your own struggles. There isn’t anyone to sort of lean on, and that was important to me. I needed to be able to rely on myself, and not to have any other person I was physically bumping up against or being consoled by, or annoyed by, or whatever.
How has the book writing process changed for you since you wrote your first novel, Torch? I know in Dear Sugar, you describe the process of writing your first book as somewhat harrowing, almost like being in labor.
It’s hell. It’s still hell! It hasn’t changed. Writing is hard for me. Every Sugar column I’ve ever written is hard for me to write, and I resist it, and I don’t want to do it. Then I do it, and I think, “Why did I make such a big fuss?” That’s the same case with both Torch and Wild. Having said that, writing Wild was easier in that I had the experience of having done it before. It’s like anything. I have two children, and giving birth to my second child was like, “Okay, I’ve done this before.” Or when you get your heart broken for the second time, and you think, “I don’t think I’m going to survive, but I will, because I did one time before.” When I was writing Wild and I felt despair, I would tell myself, “This is just how it feels to write a book. This is what it is.” You feel lost, and riddled with doubts about whether this book is going to be any good or not, and I was able to say, “This is part of the process” and keep going. When I was writing my first book, it was “Maybe I just suck.” There was more doubt. So it still is every bit as hard, I just have a lot more wisdom and perspective about the experience.
So it doesn’t make it any less painful, but it makes the pain familiar enough that you know it’s not going to be eternal?
Exactly. It doesn’t make it less painful, but it’s a familiar pain. It’s like anything, right? It’s so funny how comparable this is to anything. If you’re a runner, you know it’s going to be hard to run a half marathon or whatever, but if you’ve done it before, you rely on experience to guide you through. Part of experience is just knowing that suffering is part of it, that discomfort is part of it, that doubt is part of it.
It reminds me of when you were on the trail and lost your boots. You made duct tape booties, but knowing that new boots would be in the mail at the next outpost helped you work through the pain. You dealt with the pain this time because there was an end in sight.
Yeah, knowing that those boots were there. Or, at least, assuming that they would be there. You never know, right? Until they’re in hand.
You just need hypothetical boots to goad you on.
Exactly.
