At twenty-six, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. Her journey through survival, grief and redemption has made her one of the most loved and admired authors of our time.

“Be brave enough to break your own heart.” – Cheryl Strayed

In the wake of her mother’s rapid death from cancer, Cheryl Strayed family disbanded and her marriage crumbled. With nothing to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to walk eleven-hundred miles of the west coast of America – from the Mojave Desert, through California and Oregon, and into Washington state – and to do it alone. She had no experience of long-distance hiking and the journey was nothing more than a line on a map. But it held a promise – a promise of piecing together a life that lay in ruins at her feet.

She told that story in Wild, the internationally-bestselling memoir that became an Oscar-nominated movie starring Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl and Laura Dern as her mother Bobbi. Since then Cheryl has become one of America’s most celebrated essayists, sharing inspiration and advice honed through the twists of her remarkable life: whether in her “Dear Sugar” columns and podcast, fiction, or collected aphorisms. Her honesty, spirit, and ample supply of tough love have enabled many of us, even in the darkest hours, to somehow put one foot in front of the other.

Now, as we look back upon the shared hardship of the global pandemic, Cheryl returns to How To Academy for a livestream, In Conversation event with Hannah MacInnes.

Praise for the work of Cheryl Strayed:

“I love this book. I want to shout it from the mountaintop.” – Oprah Winfrey

“Big-hearted, keen-eyed, lyrical, precise…Cheryl Strayed reminds us in every line that if defeat and despair are part of human experience, so are kindness, patience, and transcendence.”  – George Saunders

“Angry, brave, sad, self-knowing, redemptive, raw, compelling, and brilliantly written… It is destined to be loved by a lot of people, men and women, for a very long time.” – Nick Hornby, The Believer

“It’s not very manly, the topic of weeping while reading… Wild pretty much obliterated me.” – Scotsman