There’s a matter-of-factness about Chloe Caldwell’s sexually uninhibited, confessional essays, Legs Get Led Astray (Future Tense Books). “I am the type of person who will give anything to anyone I feel I could love, ” Caldwell writes at one point. Caldwell is young—her work reflects that—but that is not to say the writing is immaterial or inchoate. It’s what I would call a greedy, ugly kind of “young,” the kind that makes you wonder if we are most alive, in a monstrous way, when we’re being hideous and awful. We spoke to her over Facebook about her frank and voracious […]
Tag: Cheryl Strayed
A (Long) Painful Path to Self-Knowledge: Cheryl Strayed’s ‘Wild’
by Byard Duncan
Close to the beginning of Wild (Knopf, 336 pages), Cheryl Strayed’s compact and potent memoir about hiking 1,100 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail, the author finds herself holed up in a remote motel room, assessing her baggage. In a literal sense, this means tallying up the all the things she thinks she’ll need for the trek – a lantern, a tent, a foldable saw, a packet of condoms – and stuffing them into a giant backpack. In a metaphorical sense, it means mapping out her escape from a life punctured by difficult endings: the unexpected death of her mother, […]
The Thousand-Plus-Mile Journey to Sugar: Q&A with Cheryl Strayed
by Antonia Crane
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail is Cheryl Strayed’s brave and beautiful memoir about the author embarking as a young woman on a journey she’s underprepared for, doing so at a time in her life when she needed to move mountains—or at least, move among them—to feel complete again. When Strayed’s mother dies unexpectedly, she grieves hard and becomes feral. The phrase “walk it off” comes to mind as Strayed follows through on the heroic impulse to hike 1,100 miles alone. It sounds miserable. It sounds impossible. In her youthful stubbornness, she doesn’t know she can’t […]