Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found

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Sexy, uplifting . . . Fierce and funny . . . Strayed hammers home her hard-won sentences like a box of nails. The cumulative welling up I experienced during Wild was partly a response to that too infrequent sight: that of a writer finding her voice, and sustaining it, right in front of your eyes. . . . Riveting.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times didn’t seem to bother my mom. She was preoccupied with nothing but eradicating her pain, an impossible task in the spaces of time between the doses of morphine. We could never get the pillows right. One after- noon, a doctor I’d never seen came into the room and explained that my mother was actively dying.

Would I need it? I wondered meekly, bleakly, flopping down on the bed. It was well past dinnertime, but I was too anxious to feel hungry, my aloneness an uncomfortable thunk that filled my gut. This dialogue in this book seemed to have a Lieutenant Horatio Caine (David Caruso in CSI Miami) undertone. On her first day in the hospital, a nurse offered my mother morphine, but she refused. “Morphine is what they give to dying people,” she said. “Morphine means there’s no hope.”I also wish the child welfare issues were researched more carefully and were less sensational - if the voices behind this book want the press to stop seeking a scapegoat whenever something terrible or unpleasant happens - it seems the author would try to do the same and honestly examine every side of this fictional story. How are you feeling?” I’d coo hopefully when she woke, reaching through the tubes to smooth her flattened hair into place. Strayed’s language is so vivid, sharp, and compelling that you feel the heat of the desert, the frigid ice of the High Sierra and the breathtaking power of one remarkable woman finding her way—and herself—one brave step at a time.” — People (4 stars) Out of nowhere, a small unspeaking child walks out of the Olympic Forrest. Looking rugged and uncared for, the town works to uncover the young girl’s past and find her parents. Julia is brought in as a doctor to help the child heal and develop. Overtime, Julia forms a strong connection with the girl they name Alice. Can the characters each heal their own past wounds, fight for what’s right, and put the child first? What will become of young Alice? Wild / Awards and Recognition". NPR Arts & Life > Books. Archived from the original on January 19, 2015 . Retrieved January 18, 2015.

When my mother asked him for more morphine, she asked for it in a way that I have never heard anyone ask for anything. A mad dog. He did not look at her when she asked him this, but at his wristwatch. He held the same expression on his face regardless of the answer. Sometimes he gave it to her without a word, and sometimes he told her no in a voice as soft as his penis in his pants. My mother begged and whimpered then. She cried and her tears fell in the wrong direction. Not down over the light of her cheeks to the corners of her mouth, but away from the edges of her eyes to her ears and into the nest of her hair on the bed. When she heard his name, she opened her eyes: blue and blazing, the same as they’d always been. In all this, they hadn’t changed. We pulled into town in the early evening, the sun dipping into the Tehachapi Mountains a dozen miles behind us to the west. Mountains I’d be hiking the next day. The town of Mojave is at an altitude of nearly 2,800 feet, though it felt to me as if I were at the bottom of something instead, the signs for gas stations, restaurants, and motels rising higher than the highest tree. But this was not enough. I wanted those words to knit together in my mother’s mind and for them to be delivered, fresh, to me. From within the Olympic National Forest, a young girl of six appears with a wolf cub. She is mute, except for the animal sounds and howling she makes. Her movements and behaviour are also like that of a wild animal. Who is she and how did she arrive in the town of Rain Valley? And how can she be helped?It was the same when I tried to pray. I prayed fervently, rabidly, to God, any god, to a god I could not identify or find. I cursed my mother, who’d not given me any religious education. Resentful of her own repres- sive Catholic upbringing, she’d avoided church altogether in her adult life, and now she was dying and I didn’t even have God. I prayed to the whole wide universe and hoped that God would be in it, listening to me. I prayed and prayed, and then I faltered. Not because I couldn’t find God, but because suddenly I absolutely did: God was there, I realized, and God had no intention of making things happen or not, of saving my mother’s life. God was not a granter of wishes. God was a ruthless bitch. An addictive, gorgeous book that not only entertains, but leaves us the better for having read it.” The relaxed sessions ensure easy access and a supportive, understanding and welcoming atmosphere for children and their parents or carers. Just for a minute,” said my mother, almost collapsing into one, her eyes meeting mine before Eddie wheeled her toward the elevator. Kin, John (April 12, 2013). "2013 Oregon Book Awards Winners Announced". OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting). Archived from the original on September 15, 2014.

We’ll all be together tomorrow,” I said. “And then we’ll all stay here with you, okay? None of us will leave.” I reached through the tubes that were draped all around her and stroked her shoulder. “I love you,” I said, bending to kiss her cheek, though she fended me off, in too much pain to endure even a kiss. I was on the edge of my seat. . . . It is just a wild ride of a read . . . stimulating, thought-provoking, soul-enhancing.” At the age of 22, Strayed had been devastated by the lung cancer death of her mother, who was only 45. Her stepfather disengaged from Strayed's family, and her brother and sister remained distant. Strayed and her husband divorced, and eventually a lover convinced her to start using heroin. [1] I wanted to scream at him when he walked in the door a half hour later, to shake him and rage and accuse, but when I saw him, all I could do was hold him and cry. He seemed so old to me that night, and so very young too. For the first time, I saw that he’d become a man and yet also I could see what a little boy he was. My little boy, the one I’d half mothered all of my life, having no choice but to help my mom all those times she’d been away at work. Karen and I were three years apart, but we’d been raised as if we were practically twins, the two of us equally in charge of Leif as kids. We were both seniors in college when we learned she had cancer. By then we weren’t at St. Thomas anymore. We’d both transferred to the University of Minnesota after that first year—she to the Duluth campus, I to the one in Minneapolis—and, much to our amusement, we shared a major. She was double majoring in women’s studies and history, I in women’s studies and English. At night, we’d talk for an hour on the phone. I was married by then, to a good man named Paul. I’d married him in the woods on our land, wearing a white satin and lace dress my mother had sewn.

In the mornings, I would sit near her bed and try to read to her. I had two books: , by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora Welty. These were books we’d read in college, books we loved. So I started in, but I could not go on. Each word I spoke erased itself in the air. Cheryl Strayed Hikes Her Way Through Heartbreak in Wild". Oprah.com (also, April 2012 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine). March 2012. Archived from the original on March 24, 2012. (Originally titled "Inward Bound: Hiking Her Way Through Heartbreak").