In the winter of 1994, while queuing to pay for a shovel in a Minneapolis hardware store, Cheryl Strayed picked up a book called The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California. The PCT, she learned, is a continuous wilderness trail that runs in a jagged 2,000-mile line from the Mexican border in California to a bridge spanning the Columbia River just into Canada. She put the book back on the shelf, and left.
At just 26, Strayed had a lot of shit to shovel. She had lost her mother to cancer, flunked college one paper short of a degree, been divorced from a husband she still loved, and generally thrashed about in the shockwaves of this extended trauma. Drifting from state to state for several years, she was now in Minneapolis where she waited tables and had sex with strangers. She was so far from the idea of herself she had grown up with that she had come, literally, to assume a new identity: when her divorce was finalised, she changed her (undisclosed) surname to Strayed.
Choosing a new name for yourself is both a symbolic gesture and a statement of intent, a strategic investment in the future. Strayed was a shrewd choice; it was clever not to choose Strays, which implies a refusal or inability to change. In a culture that rewards the remodelling of the self, "Strayed" is a canny piece of self-agency – a kind of directed lack of direction in which every signpost points to personal overcoming and a slot on the Oprah Winfrey Book Club.
Armed with a problem of existence and a surname that incorporated it, Strayed returned to the hardware store and bought the guidebook. She worked tables and saved and gradually assembled the necessary equipment and provisions (including condoms) for a solo hike along a section of the Pacific Crest trail that runs through California and Oregon. She packed supply boxes and arranged for a friend to mail them at intervals to post offices near the trail. Finally, seven months on, she took her first steps on the PCT, with the goal of reaching the Bridge of the Gods (redemption being on the agenda), a thousand miles to the north. Her backpack was so heavy she couldn't stand upright. She called it "Monster". Thus encumbered with a burden that could not be borne – she had become her own ugly baggage – she stumbled awkwardly on to the path of self-discovery.
What follows is a thoroughly artless transcription of personal history, a kind of anti-Kerouac memoir where the heat of immediacy is sacrificed, maddeningly, to the cooler demands of meaningfulness. A bear appears on the trail, runs off when Strayed blows her emergency whistle, but in which direction, ahead of her or behind? Cue existential sweat about walking the line (as in, you know, life), facing your fears, advancing rather than retreating. The bear is significant. For her. It exists, like everything else in what might otherwise have been a striking landscape, only as a subdivision of her own concerns. A fox looks at her. She whispers to it, "Fox". He ambles off, she calls gently, ruefully, "Come back," and when he doesn't she shouts "MOM! MOM! MOM!" The fox can't just be a fox, he has to be transformed into an integer of loss, a piece of mental taxidermy.
Long distance walking requires a kind of rhythm, and so does writing about it. Strayed has a tin ear for this, and keeps missing the beat. It is a singular achievement to describe a thousand-mile walk and leave the reader so far behind. She encounters a charging Texas longhorn bull, rattlesnakes, some more bears, she hears the yip-yip of coyotes at night, her toenails fall off because her boots are too tight, she loses one boot so has to walk in plastic sandals held together with gaffer tape, her skin chafes and bleeds under the heft of her pack, she is forced off the trail by record snowfalls, she meets a man and has sex with him, she meets other men and manages not to have sex with them – all this recorded in prose more broken and uneven than any wilderness trail. Oh for the tarmacadam of a single smooth sentence, with no slip roads leading into metaphysical dead-ends like this one: "What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here?" What?
Strayed reached the Bridge of the Gods, in case you were wondering. She found "the me inside of me". She has sold the film rights to Reese Witherspoon, with Nick Hornby, who finds this book to be "brilliantly written", supplying the screenplay. Oprah loves it and has welcomed Strayed to her industrial complex of self-transformation. Nice one Cheryl.
• Frances Stonor Saunders's The Woman Who Shot Mussolini is published by Faber.
