Wild starring Reese Witherspoon is better than the book

There is nothing more embarrassing then watching a good “tear-jerker” movie while on a plane and having complete strangers stare at you in disgust while you ugly cry into your tiny square beverage napkin. Unfortunately this seems to happen to me a lot since I travel frequently for work.

My last experience all started with the book Wild by Cheryl Strayed. I was very interested in reading this book, because I love true stories where the main character overcomes huge obstacles to achieve self-actualization. Wild had all these qualities and I couldn’t wait to dive into the book.

The book started off slow with the first few pages focused on her back story that was merited given the context, but when I was 100 pages in I started to get bored. I found I couldn’t relate to Cheryl’s personality. Even though I too had loss a parent in my twenties,  I had a hard time understanding the choices she made and how she dealt with the consequences. So I ended up skimming the last few chapters in order to find out how it ended.

Flash forward to last week where I’m on a 6 hour flight from eastern Canada to LAX in the middle seat crammed between two large people who are hogging the arm rests. To distract myself from my discomfort I scrolled through the inflight movie selections and saw Wild starring Reese Witherspoon. I decided to press play hoping maybe the movie would give me some insight into the meaning of the book. Two hours later the movie ended and I found myself ugly crying and trying to hide it from my neighbors and failing miserably.

The movie was fantastic which is crazy for me to believe because I usually find books that are made into movies are a complete disaster, but not in this case. I think the key successes were Reese Witherspoon’s awesome performance, the director's uses of little dialog to create the perfect tone for the film and the equal blend between flash back scenes and present time to tell the whole story.

These successes helped me gain a better understanding of Cheryl’s relationship with her mother and the hardships that she faced trying to control her grief which is the exact relation I was hoping for when reading the book.

My favourite scene is when Cheryl played by Witherspoon has to rip off her toenail and in the process ends up losing her hiking boot down a cliff. As she stands up and screams f--- you and throws her other boot down the cliff after it, I finally understood the meaning of the book.

I’ll elaborate on what I mean by sharing something a good friend once told me. He said that when you lose someone close to you time will help to heal all wounds. What he meant by that statement was you will always grieve for the person you lost and the process starts with your grief controlling you and as time goes on you learn to control your grief. The main thing to remember is to let the journey happen.

The embarrassment of my flight experience was overshadowed when I came to realize what Cheryl’s story meant to me. Cheryl said that she hiked the PCT trail in order to become the woman her mother raised her to be. I think the hike took her on a journey that helped her learn how to control her grief and move on to become the woman she always wanted to be.