The Cheryl Strayed Effect: Women Tell Their Wild Stories

Still from Wild. Photo: Fox Searchlight

Jessica Valenzuela, 39, is a Los Angeles hair stylist with a curvy, petite figure, and glamorous smile offset by Milani lipstick in Cinnamon Spice. Five years ago she weighed 240 pounds. She had been thinking about getting gastric bypass surgery but never gotten up the courage to do it. Then her boyfriend dumped her. “All of a sudden, I wasn’t scared at all. It was the kick in the butt I needed.”

It’s true that reacting to a breakup with an elective surgery that makes you hot is not the same as reacting to a divorce and the early death of your mother and a heroin habit with a 1100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, which you then turn into a bestseller, which is then turned into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon—premiering tomorrow. But Wild author Cheryl Strayed and Valenzuela have much in common: facing loss, they chose transformation.

Wild author Cheryl Strayed

Beth Roy, a San Francisco therapist with 40 years of experience, says that the desire to do something radical after a loss is not terribly common, but it does happen. “I see it occasionally. Certainly no one has run off and hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. I see things like people going to ashrams.” Roy realizes that it’s a sort of therapist’s adage that when something terrible happens, you advise, “Don’t make any big decisions for several months,” but she doesn’t subscribe to it. “A loss shakes loose so many possibilities, and I think people are right to do what the spirit moves them to do.”

When her husband of six years died suddenly, leaving Beth Howard a widow at 47, the spirit moved her to hand out free pies on the streets of Los Angeles. “I knew that sharing pie made people happy, and that made me feel better, and that was a good start.” Granted, the free pie was just a one day thing. But it inspired her next move which was more rash, and more permanent. Howard left her home in Los Angeles, rented out the house in the Grant Wood’s painting “American Gothic”—yes, that actual house, in a tiny Iowa town where she knew not a soul - and opened up the Pitchfork Pie Stand. “I simplified my life in a huge way. There were no restaurants to go to, no traffic, not much social life, not that many choices to make,” said Howard, who is now writing a book about those four years she had the stand. “I had a lot of grief, but when I was making pie, it made my world a little easier to handle.”

Still from Wild, Courtesy Fox Searchlight

This paring down of one’s world and the ease it brings to the tired soul is a constant theme in Wild. “I considered my options,” Strayed writes toward the book’s beginning. “There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.”

It’s true that deciding whether ice water or vodka makes for a flakier crust (ice water, says Howard) is less stressful than deciding whether to continue on a treacherous, physically demanding journey. But each woman found relief in the drastic narrowing of her focus. “When people’s whole world view is shattered, they feel powerless,” says Licia Ginne, a Santa Cruz, CA based therapist. “When you give yourself something you can gain mastery over, or create a set of circumstances where there is a measurable way to succeed or fail, you give yourself back a sense of power that being overwhelmed by grief takes away.”

Still from Wild. Photo: Fox Searchlight

Wild went from well-reviewed respectable memoir to sensation when Oprah backed the book several months into publication. A lesser known, more emo albeit heart-mending journey was taken by French artist Sophie Calle back in the 80s. Dumped by her lover – who was supposed to meet her in India after a long journey, and never showed – Calle decided to tell her story to 99 people, and to in turn listen to their saddest story, and to record both. “ Anybody who stopped to ask me why I was crying, I would tell them,” said Calle, who recounted these conversations in a book called Exquisite Pain. “I knew the project would stop when I got bored with talking about my pain or when I became disgusted and ashamed of the way that my banal love affair was nothing compared to the stories of greater unhappiness they were telling me.” It only took a few months. (Heartbroken people everywhere applaud!) Calle’s speedy recovery is probably based less on the extreme nature of her project than the fact that it involved going deep into, rather than fleeing from, her worst feelings. Ginne warns anyone considering a post-tragedy change, adventure or general mishegas to examine if they are just trying to escape. (Packing for a cross-country solo backpacking trip and laying in a supply of whiskey and peyote might be a sign things are awry.) She also cautions against trying to find the “antidote” a term coined by Los Angeles analyst Robert Stolorow. “Like, ‘I’m going to lose the weight and everything will be better,’ or, ‘I’m going to throw everything into this business, and everything will be better.’ People have this mistaken belief that there’s a solution to every problem.” And sometimes there is no solution, or the solution is emotional. “Which means therapy.”

Still from Wild. Photo: Fox Searchlight

Ginne also thinks that these grand gestures can be very positive. “They can really allow the person to savor life, to enjoy what is there even when something else is n ot. And also to regain some of the innocence they had before they got their world so completely rocked.”

What could be more innocent, for example—assuming Schoolhouse Rock is the height of innocence—from making a decision to go to every single state capitol (that’s capitol with an o meaning the actual building where laws get made not merely the city that contains it) after being dumped by the (supposed) love of your life? “He was really into American history, so I felt like I should do some grand, super American gesture—but it was a grand gesture in a vacuum, since my ex had no idea I was doing it,” says P., then 28, now 45. “What I liked about it I guess, was that it was exiling and required a lot of stamina. I guess I felt like if I suffered enough, he would just come back to me.”

He didn’t. But P. ended up going on a part of the capitol-seeking road trip with an old friend, and, while they didn’t get together on the 11-state haul, three years later, they did end up getting married. “When I read Wild I remember her kind of struggling to explain to people why she was hiking the PCT and I suffered from the same problem while I was on my crazy quest. At its heart the journey was about my childish hope that someone I once loved would find me lovable again. The joke of course is that a different someone, that someone I married! did end up loving me.” But oddly, that is not the big takeaway of the trip for P, who thinks she would have gotten together with her husband anyway. “It’s more like whenever someone mentions a state capital, I’m like, “I’ve been there!”

Informed about the antidote theory Valenzuela is pensive. “I found out my ex saw a picture of me the other day. And he was like, ‘Whoa, I messed up.’” Now she breaks into a big smile. “And I thought, ‘Yeah – it’s a little late for that.’” She may not have a book deal and a movie or be famous, but I can’t imagine Strayed’s much happier than Valenzuela is right at this moment. “At the end of the day,” Ginne says, “Success is the best revenge.”