My sister Laurie’s friend Maureen left this book on the nightstand in the guest bedroom when we spent the night at her house before we set out on our drive from Colorado Springs to Portland, Oregon last Thanksgiving. I didn’t realize at the time that Maureen was offering it to us because she had finished it. At the send-off party that same evening, another friend of Laurie’s also recommended this book, but it would be nearly a year before I would be being able to “sport-read” again.

I started this book last weekend while we were camping in Gualala and really enjoyed it, especially the Acknowledgements on the last few pages which give a sense of why it took 15 years to write. It made me realize it can take a lifetime to write a novel, and why it is important to stay fully alive for your whole life. This is one of my favorite passages, page 258, where she reflects on her marriage that she tanked through infidelity:

What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything different than I had done? What if I’d actually wanted to fuck everyone of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

I’m glad I read the book before the movie came out.

I like books that have me thinking about them afterwards. Even though his book was “first-person adventure,” the hike along the Pacific Coast Trail was just the engine that conceals the real content. As Cheryl hikes, she reflects on how she trashed her marriage, and other seriously-bad decisions she made. There are no comments or analysis from the 15-years-hence writer, just the ruminations of the hiking 27 year old on bad stuff she did — how she hurt someone she loved very much. The first-person ruminations gave me some insight into how people might feel when they behave badly in their own lives. I find myself using this book as fodder to consider what it would be like to not take the self-destructive behavior of others personally — but rather, to consider it as part of their own way of working out their rage or disconnection from Oneness-That-We-Are. Nothing like months on the trail to connect a person to the Divine!