Hey, sweetie. Look at you. You and your wild boots.
I'm wearing my wild boots, and your honor.
Cheryl Strayed's best-selling book Wild captivated millions of readers and inspired an Oscar-nominated film. But, in a twist Cheryl never even predicted, many of her words have sparked an internet phenomenon.
When people take a quote, they're making it their own. You know, I wrote it, but it belongs to them.
Four years after the enormous success of Wild, Cheryl's powerful, deeply personal quotes are some of the most shared, tweeted, and memed on social media. Cheryl calls quotes mini instruction manuals for the soul. They are the heart of her latest best-seller, Brave Enough.
Quotes, at their core, almost always shout Yes!
Cheryl's memoir details her harrowing 1,100 mile trek on the Pacific Crest Trail. Her quest to reclaim her shattered life after her mother's death resonated deeply with readers.
I said, I have to bring back the book club, because I can't keep it to myself. I just can't keep it to myself. I need to shout from a mountaintop. I need to shout on the web. I need to tell everybody I know about this book.
Four months after Wild was published, Cheryl released another best-seller called Tiny Beautiful Things. It's a compilation of the popular online advice columns she wrote under the pen name Sugar. Cheryl's willingness to reveal her own struggles in order to help her readers won her a passionate and devoted following. With Brave Enough, Cheryl honors that connection by collecting the quotes her legions of readers told her they found most inspiring.
During this whole process of writing, did you change the way you were able to express suffering? Because I had read that at one point that you thought that that was like, don't tell that story. And now you feel completely different. That in the sharing of the story...
Yeah. Well, I would say that that's the lesson, you know, one of the most important lessons I learned through the success of Wild is that it was such an affirmation that if you take that risk, if you take that chance, if you tell that the truest, hardest, deepest story you have within you, you're not going to step into the light and find that you're there alone. That you're going to be surrounded by people who are there with you and say, me too.
And when you take that, essentially you're risking vulnerability, you're risking showing your truest nature.
And you know, here I was writing about the death of my mother. You know, as you know, my mom died of cancer when she was 45. It was the greatest loss of my life. And it was that story that I had to tell over and over again. I've told it in all of my books. And there was a point where I felt like, okay, Cheryl, you need to shut up about this. This is, you know, a lot of people die of cancer. Quit complaining about it. Quit moaning about it.
But I had something really true to tell about that loss. And also what came after that loss. That me finding my way back to life through remembering the love that my mother gave me. And I ended up when I did take that chance of telling that very specific story, speaking with the universal voice. That's what I found. Cuz I wasn't just talking about myself. I was talking about all the people. And people around the world, not just here in the US. That's been astounding to me.
I went to India and I was giving this reading in this packed room in Jaipur, India. This tent at the Jaipur Literary Festival. Hundreds of people. And I looked out and I thought I was terrified and I just thought I'm going to do what I do and I finished my talk and I went and sat at my little table where I was to do my book signing and those hundreds of people all lined up and they all said to me all the same things that people say to me in Ohio and Los Angeles and you know all of that. Exactly. The same things. And again, you know, we are more the same than we are different.
Do you think that every person has that truth within them to speak whether they can write it or not?
I do. I do. I mean, obviously, you know, the work I do is as a writer, but the life I have is as a human. I think that every time you take that, that you find that strength to show your true self. You know, risk showing that self that makes you feel a little uncomfortable, a little like you might be, you know, found out to be the weird one after all. That almost always when I take that chance, whether it be in small talk or in a book...
Well, not just risk, be brave enough to break your own heart, which is your quote.
That's my quote. And what that's about is being brave enough to risk intimacy, to risk rejection, to risk failure. And all of the best things come when you do that.
Because it's about really when you risk all of those things, you are really daring to be more human.
You are. You are. And I think that sometimes you learn things the hard way and you never forget it, do you? Never ever ever forget it. Being brave enough to break your own heart is about being brave enough to make the decisions that end up being really right for you. And also brave enough to sometimes make a decision that wasn't the best one in the end, but you learn from it.
Well, there's no decision that you can't learn from.
First of all, can you finish this? I feel the presence of God when...
When I'm in natural, beautiful, wild places.
I experience love when...
