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The Wanting Was a Wilderness: Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and the Art of Memoir
Top of the pile
93
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
99/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Alden Jones
Publisher:
Fiction Advocate
Date:
August 25, 2020
How did Cheryl Strayed turn a solo hike into an inspirational memoir, beloved by millions? Memoirist and professor Alden Jones sets out to explore why. But when a sudden personal crisis occurs while she is writing, Jones realizes she must confront some difficult truths, both in her life and on the page. The Wanting Was a Wilderness blends criticism, craft analysis, and a memoir of Jones's own time in the wilderness. The result is a celebration of WILD and a map of our long path to self-discovery.
What The Reviewers Say
Both literary criticism and memoir, Alden Jones’s The Wanting Was a Wilderness serves to deconstruct the craft through Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild, and to construct her own narrative.
... no one has done it quite like Alden Jones in her new critical memoir, The Wanting Was a Wilderness, in which Jones takes a scalpel to Cheryl Strayed's Wild, and then—having pinpointed what transformed the story of a hike into a massively popular memoir—simultaneously composes her own memoir, essentially testing her own theories on craft as part of the text.
Exploring the terrain of truth, especially the mirror of our past actions, is not for those lacking determination. And Jones now has the grit her teenage self longed for when she signed up with Outward Bound. She recognizes that, unlike Strayed’s Wild, her own memoir can’t stop at the trail’s end; that her own journey 'had many false endings. I had a lot further to go.' In the final chapters of The Wanting was a Wilderness, Jones confronts and examines her history of picking partners with no desire to commit, and her pattern of pushing, 'the responsibility for my emotional experience onto others.' She recognizes this is yet another way of being lost in the wilderness and begins to nurture a budding self-compassion. Self-compassion enough to break her own heart as the final chapter ends and she leaves behind the map others have created for her. As she begins to find her own way..
A vivid analysis of Strayed’s Wild is the backbone of Alden Jones’s The Wanting Was a Wilderness, but it does more than tell you what makes a good memoir. Jones shows how it’s done.
