The advice column offers a condensed version of this narrative, with the crazy turned down and centred, instead, on an empathic urgency. The trauma of her grief, of her life, renders her crazy it is crazy to push away a Good Man. In Wild, Strayed encounters marital demise as the consequence of crisis, the final punctuating snap after a tailspin in the years immediately after her mother’s death. Throughout, Strayed offers a narrative trajectory that might sound familiar to the unhappy women plaintively seeking answers to counterintuitive romantic predicaments from advice columns, Reddit boards, and the stereotypically pinker quadrants of the internet. Wild is a chronicle of dissolution: the death of a parent, the destruction of a marriage, a stint of addiction, and the author’s self-redemption by way of a gruelling physical quest. This column had been written by Cheryl Strayed, about a year before she unmasked herself and released the bestselling 2012 memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. The piece, “The Truth That Lives There,” was actually an entry in an ongoing advice column, answered by a then anonymous woman addressed only as Dear Sugar. She copied and pasted the excerpt-a block of beatitudes for the guilty heart-into the chat window so that I could read it first. Go, even though you don’t know exactly why you can’t stay. Go, even though you’re sure no one will ever love you as well as he does. Go, even though you’re afraid of being alone. Go, even though you once said you would stay. Go, even though your friends will be disappointed or surprised or pissed off or all three. Go, even though he adores you and your leaving will devastate him. Go, even though you can’t imagine your life without him. Go, even though he’s your best friend and you’re his. Go, even though he’s kind and faithful and dear to you.
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