Author: Samantha Rice

Beloved, international best-selling author, Cheryl Strayed will appear in Soho on November 20th at House Works on 126 Crosby Street. She is most famous for her book Wild which was a #1 New York Times best selling memoir. This event will feature her new book Brave Enough.

Brave Enough, will have 100 of her most famous quotes which will shed light on her life experiences.

Cheryl Strayed is a fighter. She is the victim of an early passing of her mother caused by lung cancer. Strayed was only 22. After her mother’s death, she was completely destroyed.

“My whole life sort of ended when my mom died. I had to remake it again and be a new person in the world without my mom,” states Cheryl according to Interview magazine.

Everyone responds to grief differently. In order to compensate for the lack of her mother, she turned to sex and drugs. Although this reaction to grief is heartbreaking, it is not uncommon. The mother daughter relationship is an inexplicable relationship filled with an overabundance of tenderness. As defined by Carolyn Walter who has a PhD and wrote Grief and Loss Across the Lifespan: A Biopsychosocial Perspective, the “mother daughter relationship is considered the most intimate of all the parent-child relationships.”

In order to redeem her direction down the wrong path, Cheryl decided to take a 1,110 mile journey along the Pacific Crest Trail. Wild, is the compelling story of a journey that took her three months to complete.  The book was also made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon, which received an Academy Award nomination.

Wild, was groundbreaking and, according to Srayed’s website, was Oprah Winfrey’s first selection for her book club. She opens up about her experience in grief while providing flashbacks of her personal life.

“We are not allowed to be deeply sad. Grief is a thing that we are encouraged to ‘let go of,’ to ‘move on from,’ and we are told specifically how this should be done,” states Strayed in one of her essays The Love of my Life published by The Sun Magazine.

She is also the author of an essay collection called Tiny Beautiful Things, the novel Torch and the prospective quotes collection Brave Enough set to come out on October 27th 2015. Her essays have also been published in The Best American Essays, the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Salon, The Sun, and Tin House.

‘Cheryl Strayed’ is actually the author’s original name. She decided to change her name in an effort to break away from her haunting past.

“. . .Nothing fit until one day when the word strayed came to mind. Immediately I looked it up in the dictionary and knew it was mine. It’s layered definitions spoke directly to my life and also struck a poetic chord: to wonder from the proper path, to deviate from the correct course, to be lost, to become wild, to become without a father or a mother. . .” she states according to The New York Times. 

Strayed has also become a cultural icon. Many people have become inspired to quote her on their bodies with tattoos. Her tattoo was featured in “Pen & Ink,” by Issac Fitzgerald and Wendy MacNaughton, which is a book that highlights various tattoo’s of many artists and writers.

“Strayed gives the impression of tapping raw emotion while at the same time exerting tremendous authorial control. Her carefully honed sentences are as sharp as knives,” states Bernard Cooper according to Strayed’s website.

-by Samantha Rice