A Beautiful 2 X 4

If someone put a gun to my head and asked me who my favorite authors are (that happens so often), I’d probably have to say Mikhail Bulgakov, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison and Cheryl Strayed. (A Russian who carried a German Luger in the pocket of his trench coat in case he needed to off himself and wasn’t published in his own country until 50 years after writing his novels. A Jewish Russian American feminist short story author whose main character often talks while sitting on a tree limb hidden by foliage. Everyone knows who Toni Morrison is. Did that millenial interviewer really ask this Pulitzer and Nobel prize winner last year before she died if she was ever going to go mainstream and write about white people??? and Cheryl Strayed.

One of my top five all time favorite books is Wild by her. It’s not Into the Wild (easily confused) about the former Emory student who goes off into the wilderness and ends up dying in an abandoned bus. This book is a memoir by Strayed. When she was in her twenties, she lost her mother to cancer, and hiked 1,100 miles alone on the Pacific Crest Trail to try to recover from her grief. I haven’t seen the movie yet although I like Reese Witherspoon.

I lost my mother to cancer when I was twenty-nine years old, and although I did not hike 1,100 miles alone as a result of it, I did do some other Wild stuff like join a cult and become a lesbian (not something people usually do simultaneously which I think makes my story unique and will be shared in part in my forthcoming novel that I have written seven pages of and don’t know the name of yet)

So I was very happy when I found Torch in a free library in my neighborhood recently because Wild is the only thing I have ever read by her, and that was like a decade ago at least that I read it.

It made me remember why I would list Cheryl Strayed among such international greats in my favorite author list. My God she takes no prisoners. What I mean by this is she is the fiercest writer I know. It’s like she believes that the answer to life’s meaning lies in the details of things we all almost always turn away from because we can’t bare it….like what the lipstick that your mother left behind looks like, smells like…when you’ve tried to hide it from yourself forever by cramming into your glove box…how it feels to hear her voice come on her radio show ten days after she’s passed….and if you just pay close enough attention to these things and do not turn your face away from the pain, you can find a way to eventually be free.

Teresa’s kids Claire and Joshua and her partner Bruce are left behind in a small town in Minnesota after she has passed. Strayed uses gorgeous language to detail in stunning texture the physical, visual, emotional and sensorial experience of loss, and it takes the reader there. All that unfelt grief you haven’t had time for in the past few years….stick your face in a Strayed novel and it will pluck the strings of it…and who wants that, right? I do, apparently, because I was riveted, and I cared deeply about Teresa’s kids and what was going to happen to them.

Now, I will tell you that I finished the book this morning and have been a blubbering mess all day. Full disclosure. You’ve been advised. but I think there might be something to this not turning away thing. During quarantine, I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom (it will be the 20th anniversary of her death this summer) and my beloved grandmother who passed away two years before her.

My grandmother used to cry when we came, and she cried when we left, and that’s how I’ve been today. Calling young people who are graduating from high school this year and blubbering because they are so luminous and now is so hard and we are so proud, but you know what? I think Cheryl Strayed would be proud of me for not turning away from feeling like I am an emotional grandma today. She might even be proud of herself for the fact that her incredible writing (which is like getting smacked in the face by a breathtakingly beautiful 2 X 4) is what brought me there.