Not Lost Chat: Wild Sugar (Cheryl Strayed)

Brendan finds the perfect Not Lost Chat guest in author Cheryl Strayed, who not only wrote the bestselling travel memoir “Wild,” but is also a renowned advice columnist. First, they talk about Strayed’s epic trek up the Pacific Coast Trail after losing her mother to cancer, divorcing her husband, and quitting hard drugs. And then Brendan smoothly pivots the conversation to advice, talking about Strayed’s bestselling book of essays “Tiny Beautiful Things” and then getting her to answer listeners' travel questions about everything from what books to read to what shoes to wear on the road.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. The other week, I was being pre interviewed for
a chat with podcast Playlist with Leah Simone Bowen, a
CBC show that features yes podcasts, and a pre interview
is what some sophisticated shows do. They talk with a

(00:38):
guest before they record the conversation, so everyone has an
idea of what's going on. You will not be surprised
to learn that we don't conduct pre interviews here on
not Lost Chat. So I was being pre interviewed and
the producer asked me who my favorite travel writers were,
and my mind went completely blank. The name Nabokov jumped

(01:03):
in my head, but as far as I know, he
never really wrote about travel. And then I found myself saying, MFK. Fisher,
but she was a food writer who did write about
France and California, but not really on the nose. Then
said something like, well, I don't really distinguish between what

(01:25):
types of things people write about. I just have favorite
writers something Millie Mouth like that, and for a moment
I realized how hard it is to be on the
other side of questions. It's funny when I interview someone,
I often think they just have to answer questions. They
don't have to think of questions, they don't have to

(01:46):
fake laugh that it's much easier on that side. But
that actually isn't really the case, and this pre interview
reminded me of that. So I lumbered through it all
and at the end the producer said something sassy like, well,
at least now you have an idea of what you're
going to be asked when we're conducting the interview, or

(02:06):
something like that. Then later in the day, as I
was coming home from work, walking through the park that
separates my apartment from the subway, a book title popped
into my head. Black Lamb and Gray Falcon by Rebecca West.
This book which was written in nineteen thirty seven, when

(02:30):
Europe was descending into war and terror. It's this hulking
book about the former Yugoslavia, a place I've spent a
lot of time in, and the addition I have is
one thousand, one hundred and fifty pages long. It's the
size of a cornerstone of a mausoleum, which is appropriate

(02:53):
because you will kill yourself if you lug it around
on your travel for weeks on end, as I have.
If you were to drop it on your foot, you
would break your foot and lose any deposit you had
on your Airbnb. It's a real backbreaker. It is considered
rightly one of the best travel logs ever written. Rebecca

(03:14):
West herself was a towering journalist and cultural critic who
is also known for covering the Norremberg Trials for The
New Yorker and her type of writing in this book,
which it wasn't just a personal journey she traveled with
her husband, It wasn't just a dry history, it wasn't
just for portage, but it was her applying her prodigious

(03:37):
mind as she moved through this foreign land, trying to
understand something about human beings. And as it would turn out,
it became a document that gave just insight into this
moment in Europe before everything changed. So as pleased with myself,

(04:01):
I was like, great, when i sit for the actual
interview with podcast playlist, I'm going to name drop this
fantastic author, hit people to this cool book which maybe
they haven't heard of, helped raise the profile of this
wonderful author. And then when I sat down for the show,
I was never asked the question. I was asked about

(04:24):
the favorite places I visited. I was asked about Eddison Greer.
All perfectly fine, pleasant conversation, honored to be on the show,
but I felt like I was a suitor left holding
a bouquet of flowers behind my back with no opportunity
to present them until now Rebecca West, Ladies and gentlemen investigate.

(04:47):
And if she was alive today, I would have her
on this series, but she's not so Instead, this week
I've invited another fantastic female travel writer on the show,
Sheryl Straight, who walked one thousand miles up the Pacific
Coast Trail and wrote a book called Wild. We'll have
a conversation with her and then she'll also her etiquette

(05:09):
questions when Not Lost gets back. Welcome back to Not

(05:30):
Lost Chat, my series of conversations with fellow travelers. I'm
Brendan Francis, Newnham, and today I am talking with author
Cheryl Strade and conveniently for us, for me, Chryl's creative
life can be organized into two distinct categories that happened
to perfectly align with this show. The first is life advisor.

(05:55):
Charles spent years as an advice calumnist for online literary
magazine The Rumpus, where she answered questions anonymously in a
column called Deer Sugar, and then in twenty twelve, she
compiled some of her advice into a book of essays
called Tiny Beautiful Things, which became a bestseller and is

(06:15):
now being adapted into a TV show for Hulu. So
what I'm trying to say is Cheryl is a ringer
for our travel etiquette segment, which will be coming up
later in the show. But the main reason I wanted
to speak with Cheryl is because of her other creative identity,
that of travel memoirist. I think that's a word. A

(06:38):
few months before she published that collection of essays, she
published a book called Wild, which is about a year
in her early twenties when charl lost her mother to
lung cancer, divorced her first husband, started using heroin, and
then to get away from it all, she decides to
hike more than a thousand miles alone on the Pacific

(06:59):
Coast Trail. It makes the premise of not Last Season
one Like You Know, Elmo Travels Across Town Why became
a huge bestseller and a hit movie starring Reese Witherspoon,
and hiking the PCT and writing about it was a
journey of self discovery for chryl. So the first thing
I asked her when I met up with her was,

(07:21):
why do some of us have this impulse to just
start moving when big things happen to us. It's such
a great question. There are so many layers of answers
that I have to it. I think the first one
is just a very sometimes a very simple and kind
of surface impulse, which is to flee, to say, I

(07:42):
need to escape this, this sorrow or this situation or
this scene that I associate with things that hurt me.
I need to get out of here, get out of dodge,
as they say, right, we know that like when we
go venture out to parts unknown and to places that
maybe we feel kind of like an outsider or that

(08:02):
feel foreign to us, or we feel challenged in some
way because we aren't at home, we aren't in the
comfort zone. We know that in those plays we're going
to get what we most need at those moments where
we feel lost or traumatized or adrift, and that is
a deeper understanding of who we are and what the

(08:23):
world is in our place in it. You know, when
we step outside that comfort zone literally, which we do
every time we travel, we have an opportunity to see
ourselves more clearly and the world more deeply. And do
you think that comes from Is it that we are
away from our kind of patterns and the culture that

(08:44):
has defined us, or is it also we're away from
other people who kind of know us and have a
certain framework for processing us. I think it's both. You know,
the pattern thing is real. A pattern is essentially a habit,
and travel shakes us out of that literally from everything
from very often the food we eat, to the landscape

(09:05):
we see when we look out the window or when
we go on a hike, to in the case of
foreign travel, even the language that we hear. Right, it's
just everything is different and it has a way of
waking us up because we have been broken out of
that pattern. But I think something you say about being
different too because you're away from the people who know

(09:28):
you is really powerful as well, because, of course the
people who know you, they're wonderful people. They love you,
and very often some of them, but we are very
often we rely on them to actually to know us,
to be known as a wonderful feeling. It makes us
feel secure and treasured and yes, sometimes awful. But you know. Generally,

(09:49):
the people we know make us feel known, right, and
that's a good feeling, but that can also turn, you know,
on itself, and we realize that sometimes the people we
know are the people who have in some ways defined
us in ways that we no longer find accurate, or

(10:09):
sometimes that we even no longer want to be accurate.
For example, when I went alone on my Pacific Crest
Trail hike in the summer of nineteen ninety five, part
of it was getting away from this sort of group
of twenty somethings i'd sort of been hanging out with.
And I don't blame them for any of the self
destructive behavior I was doing at that time, drinking too much,

(10:32):
being wildly promiscuous, using heroin, you know, I don't put
any of that on the people I was around. And
yet those people were doing those things with me, and
they saw me as part of them, and I was like,
this isn't me, you know, this is not my life.
And part of my decision to adventure away and go

(10:53):
hike on the PCT was just saying like, I'm gonna
be different. I'm gonna put myself in different company. Now,
the company I put myself in was my own in
the wilderness. Yeah, but you know, a similar thing can happen.
If I had had more money, I just would have
gone to Paris or something. So you hiked the trail
in nineteen ninety five when you were twenty seven, and

(11:15):
you published your memoir some years later when you're forty three.
I'm wondering which was more of a demarcation point in
your life, the hike or writing the book and having
it be published. Well, without question, the hike, you know,
in my life was the demarcation point, you know. I
began the trail honestly, really really at the lowest point

(11:36):
in my life, really just feeling like what is my
purpose and who have I become? And what is my meaning?
And I didn't remember how strong I was. I didn't
remember how brave I was. I didn't know how I
was going to make good on my dreams of becoming
a writer, you know. And on the course of that trip,

(11:58):
as I walked step by step, I sort of taught
myself the answers to all those questions. I taught myself, Oh, yeah,
you are strong, and not because you're like, you know,
so victorious or grand or triumphant, it's because you decide
to keep going step by step even when it hurts.
And so, you know, when I got back finished my hike,
I then you know, went onward in my life in

(12:21):
a way that was different. And of course writing the
book was really powerful because it was like I got
to look back and essentially like I had to you know,
I had to tell the story and find the meaning
in the story, the meaning that wasn't just about my life,
but about what it means to be human. And so
of course that was also a very emotional journey. You know,

(12:41):
I learned a lot, but it didn't change my life
in the way that the hike itself did. Am I
missing out? Like there was an era where I did
some I worked at Elisa National Park, I did do
some out back hiking. I did encounter a bear, but
I'm kind of good with that. Like like I'm like,
I'm happy to look at the stars in the desert,

(13:02):
but then I like would like a martini at the
palms in so I can be missing out of some
fundamental life moments if I just kind of skip out
on the great outdoors from here. Yes, yes, damn yes
you are. I mean, though I have to say it
like I feel, I feel for you because I'm really
glad I did it when I was young, because it's

(13:22):
a lot easier. I mean, that's what That's what I've
amazed as me, Brendan. I'd like look back at that
t and I'm like, I slept every night, you know,
on the ground, just on the hard ground, right, you know.
Now it's like, Okay, I got to have a tech
repedic bed and like four pillows in the suit of
a certain arrangement and a sleep mask. You know, it's
just amazing how rough and tumble I was. But but

(13:44):
here's the deal with that. And I think that this
is a larger truth about travel is that, you know,
maybe it's doing what I did and sleeping in the
dirt in the wilderness for days on end, and really
being in a situation where you know, there were no
luxuries at all. The extreme, you know, let's put it
this way. When I would when I would come to
you know, those those campgrounds in the woods where there's

(14:06):
like an out house. If I came to a campground
that had an outhouse like which in normal life most
people are really repulsed by, I felt like I was
like the Queen of England because I got to actually sit,
you know, instead of squatting in the dirt, which I
normally did. But you know, I think that that being
really uncomfortable almost always is a really great teacher for us.

(14:32):
The times that we have to endure, the times that
we have to suffer, the times that we have to
keep going even when it hurts, those are the times
that build us and that make us that I think
deep in any trip, and of course, you know, my
hike in the PCT was one end of the spectrum,
like quite quite difficult, but even just little things like

(14:54):
last summer, my husband and I we went to Europe
for seven weeks and we had this whole trip like
planned from France to Wales to Greece to you know,
all through all through central Europe and you know, up
the Danube and all of these things. We were doing
all these things, and our bags never made it with
us and we got COVID. So it was like, Okay,

(15:17):
this isn't fun, this is hard, and we are uncomfortable
and in a foreign place. And it reminded me of
some of those lessons I learned on the PCT, that
those are the things that sometimes make the trip more interesting. Yeah,
I mean, maybe I shouldn't say this as the host
of a travel show, but it's also you can just
live in New York. You can endure great difficulty every

(15:39):
day and see the worst of humanity and still you know,
get stronger hopefully. Question Mark. Absolutely, you know, I think
that there is no city more like the wilderness the
New York City. I remember very clearly feeling that way
about it. You know, every time I go to New
York City, it's like, this is like the wilderness because
it's just so it's everything. It's it's everything, and you're

(16:04):
both very connected and very alone, just like you are
on the wilderness. Um so, so yeah, we're talking about
wild You. Then, you know your book Tiny Beautiful Things,
your column Dear Sugar, which you now do a sub
stack called Deer Sugar. It's now Tiny Beautiful Things, which
is a collection from some of the early days of
your advice column, is now being turned into a TV show.

(16:25):
And just read Sorrying Catherine Han like, holy cow, yes,
would could you picked the better person? That's incredible? Well,
my question is do people ever ask you questions about
journeys or traveling? Oh that as you do this in
all sorts of forms. That's interesting. You know. In the
in the intervening years, Steve Almond den I had a
podcast called Deer Sugars and it's an advice podcast. People

(16:48):
wrote us letters and one thing that came up very often,
I mean more than you would gas around it. It's
like people are really conflicted about, um, location, like should
I move. There was this one woman I'll never forget
on the podcast. She went to Paris and met some
like fabulous man and she was like, we fell in

(17:08):
love and to Paris and be with him. And I
was like, of course you should. And Steve was like, oh,
you know, be careful in this and that. The other
thing I'm like, I'm like, no, go, go go, and um,
you know, I remember to a letter from somebody who
met some hot Italian young man on the beach and
data fling and I don't remember what she was asking
about it, but I was always like, I'm always on

(17:30):
the side of taking risks that involve venturing out, you know,
And I do think that it is something that a
lot of people grapple with. And another thing that I
know has come up for people sometimes is like you know,
is travel a good investment. Is this a good way
to spend your money? Or should you be practical? Like
I could put you know, ten thousand dollars in this

(17:52):
savings account that I will have in my retirement, or
I can take ten thousand dollars you know, to Kenya
and I'll just tell you I've always been the person
who will say go to Kenya. Definitely, absolutely definite. I
feel like as I when I was younger, you know,
corrupted by you know, Jack Carowake, etc. I was running
around the Gamaniac. But now as I'm older, it's even

(18:14):
more I'm feeling more urgency to see everything I can
and and kind of not not because I feel like
I'm going to miss out, but because I just know
that I want to experience all, you know, all the things,
and that our time is a little more limited than
maybe we think when we're in our twenties. I see
it the same way like I can tell that you're
really a kindred spirit when it comes to this way

(18:36):
of thinking, is I do I actually do think of
it as an investment, you know that, like travel has
really improved, like it's it's improved my well being. I
think I'm a better writer because of travel. I think
I'm a better person because of travel. I think I'm
a better parent because of travel. And you know, it
doesn't feel like just like vacation. You know, usually it's

(19:00):
about having some kind of adventure or having some kind
of going on a journey that's about something deeper than
just seeing the sights and and I believe in that
something that maybe everyone knows and thinks about this with you,
but I didn't realize until I was revisiting your work.
And forgive me for being such a ding that, but
um strayed is your You chose that name, that's right,

(19:23):
which to me, like again, for maybe there's even people
encounter you with tiny beautiful things and just assume that
your god given name. Can you remind us why you
chose it? Yeah? So I was born Cheryl Nyland. My
father's last name was Nyland, and that's what I was
as a kid. And I got married just like scandalously young,
no regrets in terms of like, I absolutely loved my

(19:43):
first husband, so that was good. But you know, we
were just young in love and you know, for reasons
that are really crazy and useful, we decided to get married.
We should have just fitting each other's boyfriend and girlfriend.
But we decided to get married and we took on
each other's names because we were like, we're going to
be really feminist about it, and I'm going to take
on your name, and you're gonna take a mine, and
we're gonna have this really long name that was Nyland

(20:04):
litig Well. And so when we got divorced, when I
was like twenty five, I knew that I didn't want
to go back to being Cheryl n Island. I was
estranged for my dad since I was a young child.
He was, you know, not a great dad. He was
abusive and just not a good force in my life.
And I knew I couldn't drag around this long hyphenated
name from my marriage. And of course I'm a writer,

(20:28):
you know, I'm somebody who thinks a lot about words
and a lot about language. And so, and my mom
was dead. I was really an orphan. I didn't have
a father, I didn't have a mother, I didn't have
really anything except my own life. And I knew that
I needed to move into this new life with a
word that would be that would become mine, that would

(20:49):
be become my true name. I spent a lot of
time thinking about it wasn't just some sort of spontaneous thing.
I really thought about different words that might define or
communicate to myself in the world who I was. And
I came upon this word strade, and I loved the
meaning of it. You know, it really is somebody who
who moves through the world, motherless and fatherless, somebody who

(21:14):
strays off the regular path and finds their way. I
think a lot of people hear that word straight and
they think like, I was somebody who's lost, And for me,
I think it's really somebody who sort of has to
blaze their own trail. And when my husband and I
got divorced, just on the divorce paperwork, you could write
in this form my name after this divorce will be
and I just wrote Cheryl Straight, and that's who I,

(21:37):
you know, became. And what's so funny and interesting to me, Brendon,
as so many people who ask about the name, We're like, well, Straight,
isn't your real name? And it's like it is. It's
It's the realist name I've ever had, you know, Like
when women get married and take on their husband's name,
like nobody says like, well, that's not your real name. Yeah.
I particularly like how the words strayed, you know. I

(21:58):
think initially the connotation people think, yeah, something like a
stray cat, it's something abandoned, But there's a much broader
definition about someone who kind of goes off the beaten path,
fears away. And I like how you own that and
then by the force of your success, that word is
in every bookstore. You know, it's one movie screen, you know,

(22:19):
like you you really you took it and made it
your own. Love that my name is a sentence. I
love that. I love that. I'm going to have to
think about what my name would be if I were
to name myself, it would probably be something like Brendan Knapps,
Brendan Snacks. I'm gonna I'm gonna need to workshop it.
In the meantime, we're gonna take a quick break. But

(22:42):
when I come back, hopefully you will help me answer
some travel questions. Stick around. Welcome back to Not Lost

(23:04):
Chat Today. My guest is writer Chryl Straight and Chryl
on this show, like my old show, which you also visited,
we solicit etiquette questions, travel etiquette questions, and when I
initially decided to talk with you, I wasn't going to
ask you to answer questions, but when people found out
I was talking with you, they immediately started giving me questions.

(23:24):
So I'd like to run some of these value if
that's okay, okay real? I mean, yeah, I'm an advice columnist.
You know you are, no, I know, but I thought,
you know, sometimes it's like the comedian at dinner and
you're like, be funny. All right. So I have a
few questions from in house here at pushkin them out.
This first one I really I like, and I'm meager

(23:45):
to hear your answer. The question comes from Jordan, and
Jordan writes, how do you know in a moment you
experience in your travels is worth writing down? What's different
about it that makes it worth remembering? Well, I think
there's a They're really a couple stages to writing, and
the first one is I think you should write everything down.
I think you should write down everything you're thinking and feeling,

(24:07):
and the small things, the little gestures, the person sitting
next to you in the cafe, the kind of ice
cream you're eating. All of those details are what make
a really rich portrait. One thing I'm doing, Brendan, that's
been so interesting to me is I just decided to
transcribe all my journals. So I used to keep a
journal pretty religiously from about the age of nineteen until

(24:32):
my late thirties, kind of forty ish, and so I have, like,
you know, like really two decades of journals, and just
I'm sitting there in front of my computer and I'm
transcribing them. I'm just typing into a word document everything
I wrote. And at nineteen I got married, Like I
got married a month before my twentieth birthday, and my

(24:52):
ex husband and I we went to Ireland. We'd had
these like student work visas, and I got a job
in a vegetarian cafe in Dublin. And it was nineteen
eighty eight. And I have these journals and it's been
so amazing to transcribe them. And I'm so glad that
I that I took my own advice, the advice I'm

(25:13):
giving Jordan, which is just write everything down, you know,
take note, make a make a word portrait, you know,
as often as you can, about not just what you
see and smell and hear, about what you're feeling, what
you're thinking, what's making you happy, what's making you sad?
What are you remembering about home? You know, everything you
can put it on the page, because it later becomes

(25:35):
a treasure if you're a writer, like you're like, how
does this experience of this young woman for the first
time in a foreign country, how does that tell a
more universal story? And then you start to make, you know,
decisions about like what's the most interesting or what's what
are the universal threads. That's what I always look for
in writing, Like, for example, in Wild, the point of

(25:55):
Wild isn't like I'm such an interesting person because I
walked a really long way on this wilderness trail. You know. Really,
I think the reason that Wild resonates with so many
people is I told a deep story about what does
it mean like to have to bear the unbearable, like
to carry that heavy backpacks for that very drugged terrain,

(26:17):
and I had to keep moving forward even when it hurt.
And it's a deeper story about not just my journey,
but what journey means. Journey is all about figuring out
how you can do what you think you can't do.
My problem, which I have every day of my life
and certainly when I'm in traveling, is I wake up

(26:38):
in the morning and I'm like, I want to have
a coffee. Maybe I want to exercise, maybe I want
to run, Maybe I want to experience this, like, oh,
I want to watch the sunrise over this thing. Maybe
I donna. When do you write like like this this
idea of like write everything down? It's like what, I'm
too busy living like and I don't have a good memory.

(26:58):
My brain is a sieve, and so yeah, when do
you write? Well? I think that in both life and
and maybe especially in travel, you know, where you feel
sort of like I'm here to do all these different
things and see all the different things. Part of experiencing
a place and part of living. I think a balanced
in healthy life is having time for you know, contemplation

(27:20):
and reflection and you know, to me, I mean honestly,
one of my absolutely favorite things to do when I
travel is, you know, wander around the city or the
town or the village or whatever and just find a
place to sit and write, you know, whether it be
a cafe or a bar, or a mountainside or a

(27:41):
stone wall, you know, in some little funky part of town.
You know, just take those ten minutes to just jot
down what you're thinking, and you know, of course in life.
For me, in a strange way, it's actually harder for
me to do in life than when I'm traveling, because
I do try to make that kind of contemplative space
part of the trip. But in life, yeah, you just

(28:02):
you actually have to make the same commitment to that
as you do to everything else. If you decide that
you want to be somebody who exercises most days, you
exercise most days. And if you decide do you want
to be somebody who writes most days, you write most days.
Oh man, oh man, listen, way easier south than um. Okay.
This next question comes from Anna, and Anna asks what

(28:25):
are the best shoes to bring on a non hiking trip?
Do you just suck it up and wear ugly yet
comfy sneakers at a chic European museum? What if it rains?
I love this intersection of the practical and the not
so practical. Oh my goodness, this and this is such
a really hard question. So Anna, like, I absolutely one

(28:46):
hundred percent feel this question, and I have lived through
it for many years now. Because it is especially for women,
I will say, you know, we do have to make
this choice very often between you know, real comfort and
looking at least somewhat decent, you know, and cool and
you know, cute with whatever outfort we're wearing. But I've
I've solidly landed on this truth, and I've learned earned

(29:09):
it the hard way. Anyone who's read Wild knows how
much I have struggled with shoes and what a price
I've hate for it, losing my tone nails. Is that,
you know, comfort really matters a lot, because of course,
you can go to that museum and you won't be
able to focus on the art if all you're thinking

(29:30):
about is how much your feet are killing you. So often,
the most impressive person of all is the person who
doesn't conform, who doesn't look like they wore those shoes
because they want you to think that they look cute.
They wore those shoes because that's what they feel good.
And to me, like that's the best look of all
when you see somebody who's really like comfortable in their

(29:51):
body and at ease and able to move in a
way that makes them feel good, And it begins with
the shoes. So go in the direction of comfort and
own it all the way and until you look like
the coolest woman in the room. Here's another move. How
about a middleway, which is I've done this. You could
go to a vintage store like you could buy Probably

(30:12):
you don't have to travel with sexy footwear necessarily or
good footwear, but if you're going to a very fancy
meal or invited in some event where it's dress up,
you know, I love going through vintage stores and like
Rome or other places, and you can maybe quickly assemble
a kind of glamorous outfit that you maybe wouldn't feel
bad leaving behind. Sure. I mean one thing I did

(30:34):
last summer. I was in Europe for this like seven
week trip that included all these different things, like everything
from hiking in whales to going to like a really fancy,
very you know, Hollywood party in Greece, I mean really
really well dressed people. And I was like, listen, I'm
not going to be able to like compete with that
or where you know, stilettos or you know it wasn't

(30:56):
interested in that, but I do need something to wear
with dresses. And I did exactly what you suggested. I mean,
it's like, okay, I'll buy a pair of like kind
of fancy flip flops when I'm actually in this beach
town that I'm going to on this island, right, and
you can like have that look. It's not fancy, but
it's a little less clunky than the big comfy, you know,

(31:16):
sneakers that you might wear all day long at the museum.
So switch it up, switch it up. The only danger
there is I've made the mistake. I had my luggage
lost in Portugal this summer, and you find yourself at
a Benetton, and you can end up buying like a
mock turtleneck sleeveless shirt like you, I end up looking
like this euro like this euro club kid, which is

(31:39):
definitely not my default look. So you got to be careful.
You might go, yeah, yeah, I made a similar mistake.
I bought like a very bright green kind of like
mumu sort of dress, you know how they always have
those in like beat places. And then I saw photographs
of myself and I was like, WHOA what was I thinking?
I just I know, all right, I've one last question.

(32:03):
This question comes from Leah, and I think you're uniquely
suited to answer it, and the question is what types
of books are best to bring on vacation. That's a
great one. That's a great one. You know. It also
makes me smile because when I was hiking the trail
at first of all, books were like my only companion

(32:23):
because I very often would go days without seeing another person.
So books really really were important. They were like my
only portal into somebody else's mind, you know, other than
my own. And because I was a backpacker and carrying
the weight of one book at a time, as I
read most of the books, I would just burn them,
which just seemed like so sacrilegious, you know, as somebody

(32:45):
who loves books. It was like, yeah, I'm just going
to light this book on fire and burn it. But
I didn't want to carry the pages, so I did that.
And at the end of Wild I have this list,
you know, the books I burned on the PCT. And
so many people have asked me like, did you really
think you know really hard about which books to bring?
And what's funny is I didn't. I just really like
walked along my bookshelf and grabbed various books from it

(33:08):
that I had and had never read and had been
meaning to read and put them in each of my
resupply boxes. And resupply boxes are basically packages friends would
send you at different points in your trip. I loved
every book I read on the PCD, and there was
something really cool about serendipity of just saying, you know,
I have never gotten around to reading William Faulkner's As

(33:31):
I Lay Dying, and I put it into one of
my boxes and it became one of my favorite books.
There's also sometimes, you know, it's really cool to curate
a list of books that like are in some way
about the place you're visiting, or set in the place
you're visiting, or written by people who are from the
place you're traveling to. And that can be really cool too,

(33:53):
to actually try to deepen the lived experience you're having
by reading books about it as well. I went to
Iceland a couple of years ago, and I had never
read the literature of the country, and I found this
novel called miss Iceland by this author who I absolutely love.
And I'm not going to say her name because I

(34:14):
just don't know how to pronounce it, but it's called
miss Iceland, and it's just this really wonderful novel set
in Iceland and many decades ago. But it's like it
gave me a sense of the country and the place
and the sensibility that that deepened my experience. Then when
I got to Iceland, I kept remembering this, this main
character in the novel, and you know, she worked at

(34:36):
this hotel in Rekuveck, and and I like, I walked
by these historic hotels and I'd think, oh, that that's
like where the character worked, like and there was something
that felt really wonderful about going to the country having
read something that was set there, written by somebody who
is from there. Yeah, it's like knowing if that And

(34:57):
you know, I think books, yeah, you know, never, I
mean I would never think of traveling anywhere without a book,
because when you have a book, you always have a companion.
I think that that can be really grounding to have
just like that sort of touchstone of a story that
you're involved in while you're also in this new world. Well,

(35:20):
I think the books you took in wild there were
literary works, and I think there's a lot to be
said for a beach read or getting some genre reading in.
But I do think I will often bring like I
feel like I've only read Nabokov, like On Vacation or
Cheam Salt or some of these kind of heavier hitters
because sometimes it's harder for me to crack open and

(35:43):
get in there. But if it's the one English language
book you have in your pack, you're gonna really kind
of steep in it in a way that you maybe
wouldn't if it's just you're reading it on the sub
I agree. I don't like the whole idea that a
beach read is like a light reader. I go for
the heavy books because also when you're on a trip,
you often have more hours than in the day two read,

(36:04):
so you can sink in m Chrystade, thank you so
much for chatting with me. I'm excited to check out
your show when it comes out on Hulu, and I'm
excited to share this with my audience. Thank you so
much for taking Thank you. It was really a pleasure
to talk to you. And I have to say it
happy trails. That was Sheryl Straid. The Tiny Beautiful Things

(36:32):
TV show will be out on Hulu this spring, and
if you haven't read Wild or haven't looked at it
in a while, I encourage you to go back. It
is a luck grittier than I remembered. It is a
pretty good read that confirms my decision not to go
into the great outdoors anymore. So that's it for this

(36:55):
edition of That Lost Chat. If you have travel questions
that you want answered in a future episode, we got
one more left for this series. Please email them to
me at not Lost at Pushkin dot fm or Pingey
at bf snacks on Twitter. Not Lost Chat is produced
by Jordan Bailly, who, as we all know, travels a
lot more than me. In fact, she's heading to CDMX

(37:16):
in just a couple of weeks. The show is written
and hosted by me Brendan Francis Nunham. Booking assistance came
from Laura Morgan. This episode was edited by Julia Barton
with assistance from Managing producer Jacob Smith. Our mix engineer
and co producer is the brilliant and wonderful Sarah Brugure.
Not Lost as a co production of Pushkin Industries, Topic

(37:38):
Studios and iHeartMedia. It was developed at Topic Studios. Executive
producers include me Brendan Francis Nunham, Christy Gressman, Maria Zuckerman,
Lisa line Gang and Latom Malade. And if you enjoy
what you here, please tell a friend, make a commented
Apple podcast, spread the word. It's all greatly appreciated, and
as ever, if your inboxes lonely, sign up for the

(38:00):
Pushkin newsletter at Pushkin dot fm, slash newsletter. If you'd
like to listen to more Pushkin podcast and there's some
great stuff happening, we got deep cover. You can go
back in time and listen to Death of an Artist,
which is a fantastic show, lots of good stuff, Loudest
Girl in the World, Story of the Week. You can
listen and find them on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast
or wherever you listen to podcast. That's it for this episode.

(38:25):
Thank you for listening to the end. Bo