Writer Cheryl Strayed is the author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, a memoir about her solo hike from California to Washington state. After talking with Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum about redemption, confession, and telling a true story, she revealed that reality TV is her biggest guilty pleasure, and that everything they say about Portland, Oregon and bicycles is true.
Q. What don’t you leave home without?
A. Lip balm. I’m addicted to lip balm.
Q. Do you have any poems memorized?
A. When I was hiking I had memorized several chunks of poems, by Adrienne Rich for example. They’ll probably come back to me when I’m demented in the last days of my life, at a very old age. If you asked me to recite a poem right now, I would say I couldn’t. I could sing you a lot of songs though.
Q. Where do you go to be alone?
A. I will go for a walk in my neighborhood. There is this wonderful feeling when you’re moving-you’re in your own little world.
Q. You write an advice column for TheRumpus.net. But who’s the last person you asked for advice?
A. My husband. He’s my main advisor and best advice-giver. He always encourages me in the direction of what is in my heart or what I know to be true. That’s the best advice-giver: someone who tells you that you already know what the right answer is, and that you just need to trust it.
Q. What won’t you eat?
A. I hate beets.
Q. What cliché about Portland, Oregon, where you live now, is the most accurate?
A. All the clichés about bicycle fever in Portland. Maybe I’m influenced by that because I live on a bicycle throughway; on the street outside my house more bicycles pass each day than cars. Last summer, my son, who’s seven, said, without hesitation, “Mommy, what does, ‘What the [expletive] are you doing mean?’” It’s what the bicyclists say to the cars when they almost hit them.
Q. When do you want your kids to read Wild?
A. When they feel that it’s the right time to do it. They know about the book, and I told them it’s a book for adults and there are parts of it they don’t understand yet. I won’t be surprised if they don’t read it until they come into adulthood-when they’re 30.
Q. What inspires you?
A. I’m really inspired when people exceed what they think is possible in their lives. That can take any number of forms. I have a friend who’s a writer, he’s lost more than 100 pounds. I read his posts on Facebook, and I always feel so inspired by hearing his story. Or students of mine who say, “I’ll never be able to write that novel,” and then they do.
Q. If you could live in any time period, which would you choose?
A. I don’t envy women in previous generations and other eras. I guess I would go back to the early 20th century and be a suffragette. I could hang with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. But I’m glad I’m alive now.
Q. What’s your guilty pleasure?
A. Do I have to admit this? When I’m given the opportunity I must admit I have a soft spot for reality television. I was the original Survivor fan. I watched for the first eight seasons. I couldn’t bear to confess-it was a secret. My husband threatened to tell [writer and Strayed’s former professor] George Saunders. I will admit now openly I like to watch The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.