Alfred A. Knopf

336 pgs/$25.95

Whenever I’ve collected a particularly burdensome number of writing rejections, I like to make myself a thick-cut sandwich and fill a bottle with water and take a trail up into the hills. As I hike, my mind churns. As I rest at some vista, my mind goes still. I don’t think I’m unusual in my urge to turn to hiking when life gets difficult. In fact, in WILD, Cheryl Strayed has written an entire memoir about a hike taken to get away from troubles. Except these are no small troubles and this is no afternoon walk in the woods. This is a life-resetting, thousand-plus mile hike across the mountains of the Pacific Coast Trail.

I should say here that I know Cheryl Strayed. I’m a former student of hers and consider her a friend and a mentor. Before reading WILD, I assumed I’d leave the reviews to those who didn’t have such clear conflicts of interest. But some books, no matter how well you know their author, exist as a force of their own. They get inside you. They compel you to act.

The elevator-pitch for WILD is that it’s the story of a young, emotionally messed-up woman who decides to hike the PCT and does so without any substantive hiking knowledge or prior experience. That’s the plot. And that plot is riveting. WILD is a page turner, a classic adventure tale full of wilderness dangers and physical hardships and sweeping vistas which Strayed heart-achingly renders in her clean, clear-eyed prose. This is a good read. A damn fine read. But it’s something more than that, too. It has a purpose beyond the tales of bears and rattlesnakes and water filters and blisters.

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