What if Cheryl Strayed Was Just an Exceptional Fiction Writer?

I wonder if crazy, lost women would feel ripped off?

People love relatable human stories.

Although it shouldn’t matter whether it’s fictional or true, I feel like the majority of us prefer stories we know are based on someone’s real life.

We feel a genuine sense of validation knowing that the struggle is very real.

If you’ve ever watched the movie, Wild, based on the memoir by

Cheryl Strayed

you’ll no doubt remember the scene where she lost her shit and threw her hiking boots off a cliff.

This was my personal response to that scene:

At that time in my life, I was ready to throw actual people off a cliff, not just my boots.

I felt so validated but also a little envious. I wanted my own screaming-while-throwing-boots moment in the wild, but I was a single mom. Who the hell was going to babysit so I could go bury my crazy under a faraway snow drift?

I experienced a similar (more sane) vibe watching the

Elizabeth Gilbert

story in Eat, Pray, Love, because I had already lived out my own version of that movie - but in a different country and without all the relationshipping.

There is definitely something to be said about getting lost in a foreign country and being left to your own resources to find out:

• How to talk your way out of foreign traffic tickets.

• How to dodge chicken feet in a bowl of soup.

• Just how big spiders and centipedes can grow in the wild.

• And, exactly what fuels your soul out there in the big ol’ world…alone.

Five out of five stars…highly recommend it. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I didn’t seek out either of those movies, nor had I read the books. I chose to watch Wild because it popped up on Netflix and featured Reese Witherspoon. I had no idea who Elizabeth Gilbert was, but her name reminded me of Little House on the Prairie.

(Of course I know that was Melissa Gilbert, not Elizabeth)

But just imagine for a moment if Wild was a fictional story, not based on a real memoir. Would we feel less “seen” than we did knowing she had actually lived her truth?

My money is on NO. We wouldn’t. Because, whether true or fictional, we can still harshly relate to most messy life stories. In fact, I’m willing to bet that millions of us could write memoirs just as compelling as hers.

Hell, my story alone could incorporate both movies side-by-side, with an added dose of Ben is Back, sprinkled in for good measure. And that one, by the way, is purely fictional, yet it still rings painfully true for millions of moms.

For the love of Maynards Swedish Berries, I can’t figure out how messy people can sit down and collect their disheveled life stories into well-thought-out books. I know I can’t because if I could, there’d be a bunch of memoirs on my shelf.

I suppose that’s why some of us are bloggers and others are authors.

Blog posts don’t typically end up in books and movies, although I did receive this comment on a blog post a while ago:

“Kristi, this is an incredible story! It could easily be a movie and I would definitely pay to watch it.”

-Gill McCulloch-

See what I mean, though? We’re all one memoir away from starring in our own movie of mayhem.

All you have to do is choose who’s going to play you.

---

Whether you’ve written your memoir or whether you’ve been stuck at page one, paragraph one for the last eight years, I would LOVE to hear about it.