A Written Life
because the alphabet's personal
writer | reader | freelancer | laugher jesakalong.com
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I liked this, I really did
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“Would I have carried myself with the same swagger, or faced adversity with such feminine resolve, without Albertine as my...
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Wise words from Dolly Parton
Source: www.facebook.com/netaporter
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“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as an escape.”
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2 posts tagged wild
![powells:
I wrote letters to friends and family from the PCT [Pacific Crest Trail], but I didn’t even attempt to gather them and mine them for information as I wrote Wild. I didn’t because I sensed on a gut level that they’d be of little use to me. In my letters, I’d been trying to make an impression. I wanted to seem strong or funny or impressive, to offer evidence that I was now more together than the sort-of-falling-apart woman many of them thought I was before I set out on my hike. I wanted to seem transformed and heroic to those I wrote to. I know without reading them, my letters were hyperbolic and embellished, covertly self-aggrandizing and embarrassingly philosophical.
But my journal is none of these things. In it, I told myself the truth. Every last inch of whatever the truth might be. I didn’t attempt to cast anything in either a better or worse light. On those pages not meant for anyone’s eyes but my own I did what every memoirist must do years before I knew I’d ever become a memoirist: I gave myself a long level gaze. It was from that place I set about writing Wild.
—Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and the Dear Sugar column on TheRumpus.net, from a guest blog post on Powells.com
Can’t wait to read this memoir.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m179qjN8Ec1qd3jsao1_500.jpg)
I wrote letters to friends and family from the PCT [Pacific Crest Trail], but I didn’t even attempt to gather them and mine them for information as I wrote Wild. I didn’t because I sensed on a gut level that they’d be of little use to me. In my letters, I’d been trying to make an impression. I wanted to seem strong or funny or impressive, to offer evidence that I was now more together than the sort-of-falling-apart woman many of them thought I was before I set out on my hike. I wanted to seem transformed and heroic to those I wrote to. I know without reading them, my letters were hyperbolic and embellished, covertly self-aggrandizing and embarrassingly philosophical.
But my journal is none of these things. In it, I told myself the truth. Every last inch of whatever the truth might be. I didn’t attempt to cast anything in either a better or worse light. On those pages not meant for anyone’s eyes but my own I did what every memoirist must do years before I knew I’d ever become a memoirist: I gave myself a long level gaze. It was from that place I set about writing Wild.
—Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and the Dear Sugar column on TheRumpus.net, from a guest blog post on Powells.com
Can’t wait to read this memoir.
