‘Wild’ author Cheryl Strayed to speak in Spokane Thursday

Cheryl Strayed never expected to walk to fame.

When she set off on a solo hike of the Pacific Crest Trail in 1995, she never thought her story would turn into the best-selling memoir “Wild.”

“I certainly never imagined when I finished my hike at the Bridge of the Gods on the Columbia River that Reese Witherspoon would someday be standing in that very spot pretending to be me,” Strayed said in a recent telephone interview from her home in Portland. “Really, the most surreal experience of my life is that movie.”

The journals she kept during her hike served as the basis for “Wild,” the 2012 memoir that became a New York Times best-seller, the first book in Oprah Winfrey’s relaunched book club and the Oscar-nominated feature film.

Strayed, who is in Spokane on Thursday as the keynote speaker for the YWCA’s annual Women of Achievement Luncheon, likely will talk about her famous walk. But she also expects to talk about another topic important to her.

“I’ll probably talk about my own journey as a woman who needed to pick herself up after having some hard blows and making some mistakes,” Strayed said. “I’ll also probably talk a bit about my childhood and my mother, who was such a strong role model for me and who in so many ways really made all the difference in my life because of the choices she made.”

Strayed added that the work of women’s groups across the country has resonance for her because, “I grew up poor, I grew up with a mother who had been the victim of domestic abuse by my father, and so there’s a lot that I relate to in the work that these organizations do, and I feel very comfortable speaking from my heart about my own personal journey.”

Of course the journey that millions of readers are familiar with is the one she undertook as a 26-year-old. Still reeling from the death of her mother from breast cancer, Strayed had turned to heroin use. Her marriage destroyed, she decided to take a three-month walk on sections of the PCT from the Mojave Desert in California through Oregon to Cascade Locks on the Columbia River.

Strayed, whose childhood was spent in Pennsylvania and Minnesota, eventually settled in Portland. In 2006, she published her first novel, “Torch.” When she decided to revisit her hike for a book, there was no question that she would write the story as nonfiction, rather than fiction, she said.

“I always think of my life as material, and you don’t know how or when that will come forward,” she said.

“I write both fiction and memoir,” she added. “And I think you have to think which approach is the best way to tell the story, the most powerful way to tell the story. And I do think in this case, it was such a big life experience, a hard experience, a beautiful experience, I don’t think it would be served in any way by deciding to turn it into fiction.”

Besides, she added, so many things that really happened to her would come off as completely unbelievable or obvious in a book of fiction. “The beauty of real life is you can say, ‘I know this is crazy, but it really did happen,’ ” she said. “One of the things I think of, because I did finish my hike at the Bridge of the Gods, if I were writing ‘Wild’ as a novel instead of a memoir, my writers group would have said, ‘Oh, you can’t call her final destination place the Bridge of the Gods. That’s just too obvious. It’s like a spiritual journey that she ends at the Bridge of the Gods?’ But I get to say, ‘I know, but that’s real life.’ … Life just offered up that happy accident to me.”

When Strayed isn’t helping raise her kids — she and her second husband have two, ages 9 and 11 — or working on her Dear Sugar advice column (and its corresponding podcast she does with fellow author Steve Almond), or out enjoying day hikes, she’s at work on a follow up book.

“Which I hate talking about because it always sounds silly,” said.

Well, is it fiction or memoir?

She laughs. “That’s the silly part. I’m not sure which yet. I’m writing both. So then I’m like, ‘which one will I finish first?’ It’s like a race.”

”Brave Enough,” meanwhile, is coming out Oct. 27. It’s a book of quotes culled from “Wild,” “Tiny Beautiful Things” (a collection of Dear Sugar columns) and from Strayed’s talks.

“I never imagined people would quote me so much, but if you go onto Pinterest or Goodreads or Google ‘Cheryl Strayed quotes,’ and they’re all over place,” she said. “I love that people have taken them into their own lives and hearts and used them as mantras. So many people have gotten tattoos of the last line from ‘Wild,’ ‘How wild it was, to let it be.’ What’s coolest about that is I think it means something slightly different for each person who embraces it. It becomes this thing that I wrote that was about me, with the goal that people would connect with it. And that they have is rewarding.”