Why Cheryl Strayed went Wild

PACKING everything up and heading out to find yourself. It’s not necessarily a new concept — but no-one’s done it quite like Cheryl Strayed.

PACKING everything up and heading out to find yourself. It’s not necessarily a new concept — many people go through a relationship breakup or a tough period at work and decide to take a break from it all — but no-one’s done it quite like Cheryl Strayed.

The now 46-year-old author, wife and mother-of-two chronicles her mid-twenties breakdown, and her subsequent restoration, in Wild, a memoir which has just been turned into a film of the same name starring Reese Witherspoon.

“I decided to hike the Pacific Coast Trail in December 1995 when I was 26,” she explains to news.com.au of the 1700 kilometre hike that took her three months to complete.

“I did it at the bottom point of my life. My mother had died very suddenly when she was 45 and I was 22, and I was just undone by my grief. I didn’t know how to live without my mum — I didn’t have a father, he was barely around and he was not a good person. So I did what a lot of people do, and I turned the behaviours inward. I became sexually promiscuous, I became heavily involved in drugs. I decided I needed to save myself.”

Indeed, the movie is filled with confronting drug use scenes and flashbacks to sexual encounters, and it illustrates the slow, often painful unravelling of relationships. In one scene in particular, Witherspoon as Strayed is seen injecting heroin into her ankle in a half-conscious state, until her then-husband bursts into the room and bundles her into the car.

But scenes like these play out in stark contrast to panning shots of the nine mountain ranges between Mexico and Canada, with a solitary Strayed battling on. She was dreadfully unprepared, with boots that didn’t fit and a backpack twice her size, “but I knew that I felt the best when I was in the wilderness, and I knew that solitude was what I needed,” she explains.

If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know that there’s one scene where, halfway through the trek, Strayed meets a man and has a one-night stand. This scene has become a topic of conversation for many — if Strayed went on this trek to rid herself of destructive behaviours, surely a one-night stand is counterintuitive?

“To me, the movie is very true to the book. The book gives the story in a more interior way, but the experience with that man, it was basically like a one-night stand. In some ways it was part of the behaviours or the decisions I left behind — sexual promiscuity, but of a different sort. That experience was joyful, fun, sweet, romantic, but it also taught me that I didn’t need to do it anymore. That experience was healing, unlike some of the other things I’d done in my sex life. And you know, 9 days after I finished the walk, I met my now-husband, so…”.

Now it’s one thing to journal your experiences, but another thing entirely to watch them play out on-screen some twenty years later. Was it an uncomfortable experience for Strayed, or was it cathartic?

“It was both — it was funny at times, watching Reese wrestle the backpack, laughing at her and remembering myself in those moments, but others were difficult,” she says.

“Having to deal with the sad parts of the story was hard. My daughter Bobbi plays [a young version of] me in the movie, and she’s named after my mum Bobbi, so obviously that was incredibly powerful and moving. I went through the full range of emotions. I never felt embarrassed though, and even when I thought, ‘What was I thinking?’, I could recognise that we all make mistakes, and in so many ways.

“Memoirs are really not just about the person just writing the book, they’re about the other people involved too, and yet you have to go deep into your own truth for it. I have always written from my heart, I’ve always tried to write my best work from a place of vulnerability and truth, and I never dreamed that my book would be a bestseller and be made into a movie.

“I was so involved in every aspect of the film, and the people who made the movie were so respectful of my story. It’s interesting how universal it has now become. I’ve had many men and women saying yeah, that was me too. It’s been extraordinary, and unexpected.”

Wild is in cinemas now.