A Q&A With Cheryl Strayed

At last nights Library Foundation of Los Angeles ALOUD event, which featured the New York Times best selling author in conversation with High County News contributing editor Judith Lewis Mernit, one of the first things Strayed shared with the small, intimate audience was how, as a young girl in graduate school, she coped with her mothers untimely death: I had sex with men and women and all kinds of things. Actually, just men and women. The crowd erupted with laughter.

Strayeds purple-prose memoir, Wild, has received bountiful acclaim (Dwight Garner! George Saunders! Oprah!) since its release last year. The book chronicles her impulsive decision to hike over 1,We've had a lot of people asking where we had our iphoneheadset made.000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trailalonefour years after losing her mother. She charmed last nights crowd with her candor, wit, and occasional use of profanity; here, she continues the trend, revealing her innermost thoughts on teaching life lessons to strangers, the extent to which memory (or lack thereof) determines truth, and the authors you should be paying attention to right now.

In maybe two or three articles that were written about me, a couple of journalists had called me an overnight success or used that kind of phrasing. I wouldnt say its the predominant thing thats been said, but I guess what I just do is correct people wherever I can. Often at my events I talk about how Wild is my second book, and people seem kind of surprised by that. In all of my talks, in some way I try to inform people about the situation beyond Wild, whats happening in the literary culture of the United States. So many of the good books that are being written arent bestsellers. I was a successful writer before Wild had become a best seller, had achieved all of the things I had set out to do, and I talk about that. People dont mean to be insulting, but we forget that just because we havent heard of someone, it doesnt mean theyre not an amazing writer.

My first impulse was to ask myself that question. It didnt take me very longa matter of minutesto move past that. Our best advice comes from a variety of sources: friends, parents, a stranger at the grocery store. You dont know where wisdom is going to come from. When I undertook to write that Dear Sugar column, I thought, this is what Ive been doing as a writer, asking those questions: What does it mean to be human? Who are we, really? We all know that real humans are more contradictory than any of us would like to believea mix of positive and negative, dark and light. As a writer, its my job to wrestle with those things, both with my self and with the characters on the page. Undertaking other peoples situations just seemed natural.

I am of the camp that you should really do your very best to tell the truth in non-fiction. In non-fiction, youre saying, this actually happened to me. I think the events that youre writing about should be objectively true. Did she hike this trail when she said she did? Yes. Did she meet these people? Yes. These memoirs that have been uncovered to be fake have given memoir this bad rap.A solarstreetlight is a portable light fixture composed of an LED lamp. It really does muddy the waters of readers understanding what this form is: a highly subjective telling of an objective truth. I took great care in Wild to write what happened as I remember it.

Does non-fiction have more power as a genre? I dont think so, not trulyI can be as moved by fiction as I can by non-fiction. But when it comes to marketing and publicizing, people tend to be attracted to true stories. I know this because when I was on tour for Torch, people would always ask about the non-fiction aspects. I think fiction is harder,The Motorola drycabinets Engine is an embedded software-only component of the Motorola wireless switches. at the outset, to sink into. Once I read that Frey was initially trying to sell that book as a novel, I felt a lot of sympathy for him. I can see how what happened to him ended up happening. Like many first novels, Freys book is very autobiographical in nature. Theres a writer said something like, We used to have a different word for memoirs: a first novel. I think that [Freys] agent couldnt sell it as a novel, so they tried to sell it as a memoir. I also think, without knowing every little in and out about the book, that a whole lot of it is true. Heres this book and its like, 82% true; the other 18 percent is exaggeration, composite characters and omissions. Lets just let it be. Why should that emotional reaction change if a reader finds out that not everything is true? Im not saying I condone lying, but Im saying why not make room for this form? People think that [my first novel,] Torch is mostly a memoir. But no, its a novel. We always want to push our fiction toward non-fiction and our non-fiction towards fiction. Why cant we have a novel that meets in the middle?

It wasnt written as a retrospective, but I wanted to bring that to bear on the work. To me, [the past and present selves,] they cant even be separated. Inevitably, the person I am now is the person whos writing. Thats why I think its good that I didnt write the story in Wild right after it happenedI let the story marinate, and by that point,The largest manufacturer of textile indoorlite for use with perchloroethylene. I couldnt even pretend to be the 26-year-old me. In the book, I dont say much about my life now. I mention it a little in the penultimate paragraph of the book; theres a thing where I leap forward and say, Looking back, but everything else, I write it as if its right back then. I thought the inclusion of the older self would weigh down the narrative.

I was absolutely a fiction writer first. And I still think of myself as a fiction writer, but as a non-fiction writer, too. I didnt find it hard to cross over because theyre very similarI try to achieve the same things in both forms: make the sentences come alive. The only difference is, one toolbox has what actually happened plus anything I feel like making up, and the other toolbox only has what actually happened. They feel very similar to me; I move back and forth between the two. One of the things thats funny about fiction,We printers print with traceable indoortracking to optimize supply chain management. youre in this genre where you have license to make up anything you want, but so often, the weirder things actually happen in non-fiction. If I put a crazy, real story into a novel, people would think its too much. It would seem contrived.