The Walking Cure: Talking to Cheryl
The American Dream, for instance, is a fantasy of self-reliance, but our culture is iffy on self-reliant women.
.. It is as if only the total destruction of the domestic sphere could justify a woman’s presence on such adventures. Or rather — since Strayed’s story is not fabricated — it is as if that destruction were necessary in order to secure the audience’s sympathy for a woman doing something risky and alone.
.. As a genre, writing about the wilderness — nature writing — is a relatively recent phenomenon. It emerged, counterintuitively, during the Industrial Revolution, when everything about the rural past became an object of nostalgic interest, and nature came under threat for the first time in history. In response, people started forming a new set of relations with the natural world. Masses of amateur scientists began to observe, collect, and taxonomize it; proto-environmentalists began to sound the alarm about it; and Romantics began to romanticize it. Nature writing as we understand it today reflects, in varying degrees, all three of those traditions.
.. Wild succeeded in part because it channels so many of our oldest and most broadly shared stories. Strayed is an orphan cast out into the world; she is a bootstrapper lifting herself out of poverty; she is a pilgrim walking to salvation; she is even a pioneer, going West to grow up with the country. But her book’s deepest power might come from a different and even more time-honored journey: that of a daughter becoming a mother — in this case, implicitly, to us all. The journey Strayed recounts in Wild culminates when she learns to love herself as her mother no longer can. And that kind of love — extravagant, unwavering, undiminishable — is what she offers to her readers, and urges us to find in ourselves.