We read this book in the month where winter gives way to spring.  It’s a time I tend to think about renewal both in a literal and a philosophical kind of way.  That’s what this book is about renewal, a cleansing of the soul, a healing.

The author, Cheryl Strayed, wanted to be the young woman her mother raised and not the person she had become.  Strayed mired down into drugs, alcohol and sex to find some solace after her mother’s untimely passing at the age of 45 from cancer.

Strayed’s mother had made a difficult childhood bearable for her children.  She was one of those people that can come into your life with rainbows and fairy dust, and find wonder in everything. Strayed was inconsolable after her mother died. There was no one there to help her see the beauty anymore.

Strayed cracked.  She wined and self-loathed and self-destructed.

She slept with many men even though she was married to a man she loved.  It would destroy her marriage. This destructive cycle continued until she ended up with a man that introduced her to heroin.

Somehow without rehab she left heroin and the man behind and walked the Pacific Crest Trail.

The PCT, as the trail is referred to by hikers, is a long-distance hiking trail approximately 2,663 miles from the border of Mexico to the border of Canada. This is heavy-duty kind of hiking not usually done by beginners.

 

She was not prepared for the hike either mentally or physically.  Strayed’s backpack was way too heavy and her supplies and money weren’t sufficient. She would have to work through a lot of pain and lost toenails.

 

But, it was the pain and the aloneness that helped her heal.  She had a sense of accomplishment as she walked mountain after mountain, a sense of renewal.

 

At book club we talked about how broken the author was after her mother’s death.  We have all experience the loss of a loved one and none of us have acted out in such a way.  But, we also haven’t walked a 2,600 mile trail to heal our grief.  And, of course, we are much older than the author was at the time.  The extreme breakdown seems to match the extreme cure.

 

Everyone had a scene that they found particularly poignant or disturbing or fascinating and we talked about them.  The scene that did me in was the one with the author’s mother’s horse.  I don’t want to give any more details and ruin it, but wow!

 

We all really liked the book.

 

Rating: 8.5