Delving any deeper into her breathtaking, body-shaking sadness might hurt us too much. Or rather, if she’s holding anything back, it was a wise choice, because what made it onto the page is almost unbearably sad and true. She holds nothing back, whether it’s the horror of watching her mother fade into a morphine haze or a nightmare in which she is forced to kill her mother over and over. She knows that’s not the cause of her pain, just another symptom of her grief, which she describes in shuddering, almost gruesomely emotional detail. Her abortion, for example, takes up less than a sentence. Tragic notes that a less skillful writer would draw out - a heroin addiction, an unintended pregnancy and abortion, a string of extramarital affairs - are struck quickly and ruthlessly. Her grief may be operatic, but the healing, the “real live truly doing it,” is not. Once she gets “wanting was a wilderness” out of her system, Strayed walks us through her healing process in more prosaic language. “The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods,” she tells us before diving into tales of enormous backpacks, friendly fellow hikers and treacherously icy mountain paths. Most of the book is subtler, sneakier, focused on the quotidian details of life hiking the Pacific Crest. It’s only a paragraph, but it sticks in your heart, like so many of Strayed’s lines.

The scenes she gives us are incisive and telling - crying in a public bathroom after her mother receives a diagnosis of incurable cancer, her mother crying the next stall over, neither saying a word to the other. Very little of the book is actually devoted to Strayed’s childhood and her mother’s death. But that’s not what “Wild” is for this is her story, not ours, though it’s told in her familiar expansive, yet focused, style. To anyone familiar with her column, it’s hard to not look for clues in “Wild” as to how we should live our lives - Strayed’s advice as Sugar often takes the form of a personal narrative, after all. Strayed “came out” as Sugar in February, possibly because no one could read the forthcoming “Wild” and not recognize her authorial voice. Strayed has one novel to her name, but she’s gained a huge following as the until-recently- anonymous advice columnist Sugar for, writing deeply personal essays about dealing with intimacy, loss and self-doubt. Her trek is the subject of “ Wild,” a memoir of recovering from debilitating grief by striking out on a journey that’s both necessary and totally insane. The 2,663-mile trail runs from Mexico to Canada, but Strayed chose to start in the Mojave Desert and stop at the Oregon-Washington border.

Reeling from her mother’s death (cancer 49 days from diagnosis to death), she had a single objective: to hike 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail alone. In the mid-1990s, Cheryl Strayed walked into the wilderness with a backpack she could barely lift.

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