This book, Wild, by Cheryl Strayed is the story of  a young married woman, whose mother, always close to her, died when she was twenty-two years old.  It is a very good account of the deep sense of loss and grief that a young woman can feel when her close mother dies.   Below are three of the very compelling passages, embedded in this very compelling account.  The paragraph to note here is the short one “But now that she was dying, I knew everything,  My mother was in me already.  Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me, too.”  The passages here which resonated was, “Nothing could bring my mother back, or make it okay that she was gone”; “I would suffer, I would suffer,  I would want things to be different than they were.”

Included as one of the books in Oprah’s book club, this is a fascinating ,journal-based book about how this young woman lost her way, after her mother died, and then found her way again as she hiked on the very rugged and wild Pacific Crest Trail.