8 books like Wild by Cheryl Strayed, from Tracks to A Walk in the Woods: trail memoirs and raw life stories matched to what hooked you in Wild.
Updated June 10, 2026
Wild is two books fused together, and that fusion is why it works. On the surface it is a trail memoir: in 1995, at 26, Cheryl Strayed hiked more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail alone, wildly underprepared, with a pack so heavy other hikers named it Monster and boots that cost her six toenails. Underneath, it is a grief memoir about the four years after her mother died at 45, the years Strayed spent unraveling her marriage and herself, heroin included, before walking herself back into one piece. The honesty is the engine; she never flatters her younger self, and the trail never becomes a tidy metaphor.
Readers come away wanting one of two threads, so this list serves both. If it was the trail, the solitude, blisters, and transformation by sheer mileage, the closest companions are Tracks, Robyn Davidson's solo camel trek across Australia, plus Into the Wild and A Walk in the Woods. If it was the unflinching life-writing, the mother, the wreckage, the rebuilding, go to The Glass Castle, The Liar's Club, and Eat, Pray, Love, with Wildflower and The Art of Racing in the Rain as lighter chasers.
A practical note: these vary enormously in weight. The Liar's Club and The Glass Castle are heavier than Wild in places, A Walk in the Woods and Wildflower are far lighter, and Into the Wild ends in a death. Each pick below says which thread of Wild it follows so you can match it to what you are actually in the mood for.
Read this if you want the journey of self-repair with comfort instead of blisters.
Elizabeth Gilbert's 2006 memoir is the book most often shelved next to Wild, and the spine is the same: a woman in her thirties, flattened by divorce and depression, leaves her life behind and travels alone until she can stand herself again. Gilbert spends a year across Italy (pleasure), India (devotion), and Indonesia (balance), and like Strayed she writes in a confiding, funny, self-aware first person that made millions of readers feel personally addressed. Oprah championed both books, and they are frequently recommended as a pair.
The texture is very different. Gilbert's suffering is real but her journey is cushioned, financed by a book advance, with pasta and ashrams instead of rattlesnakes and lost toenails, and some Wild readers find it too smooth, even self-indulgent, where Strayed is raw. There is also a romance arc Wild deliberately refuses. Pick it when you want the renewal story in a warmer key; skip it if Wild's grit was the whole point.
Read this if Strayed's family history gripped you more than the trail did.
Jeannette Walls's 1995-era memoir (published 2005) is the strongest match for Wild's interior story. Walls grew up with a brilliant alcoholic father and an artist mother who chose painting over feeding her children, moving between desert towns and a West Virginia shack with no plumbing, and the book recounts it without self-pity or score-settling. Like Strayed writing about her mother and her own worst years, Walls manages the trick that defines both books: total candor combined with real love for deeply flawed people.
There is no journey here in the literal sense; the escape is Walls clawing her way to New York and a career while her parents end up squatting and homeless by choice. It is a harder read than Wild in its childhood chapters, with hunger and neglect on nearly every page. Choose it when you want memoir as survival story, and expect to hand it to someone else the moment you finish; it spent years on the bestseller lists for a reason.
Read this for the real-life expedition closest to Strayed's, a decade before the PCT hike.
Tracks is the truest sibling Wild has. In 1977, Robyn Davidson walked 1,700 miles across the western Australian desert from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean, alone except for four camels and a dog, and her 1980 memoir covers the same territory as Strayed's: a young woman choosing an ordeal nobody around her understands, learning competence the hard way, and finding that extreme solitude rearranges who you are. Strayed herself has cited Davidson among her inspirations, and the two books are constantly paired.
Davidson is a pricklier narrator than Strayed, less confessional about her past and angrier at the world watching her, including the National Geographic photographer whose visits she resents. The book spends real time on Aboriginal communities and the politics of the outback, which gives it a documentary weight Wild does not attempt. Pick it when you want the adventure itself, rendered by a writer who never once asks you to like her. The 2013 film is decent, but the book is better.
Read this if you want the long-trail experience with laughter instead of grief.
Bill Bryson's 1998 account of attempting the Appalachian Trail is the other famous American long-trail memoir, and it shares Wild's best comic material: the absurdity of an unprepared person meeting a very long trail. Bryson, middle-aged and out of shape, sets out with his even less fit friend Katz, and their misadventures with gear, weather, and fellow hikers are genuinely funny. Between episodes Bryson folds in the trail's history and ecology, so you finish knowing far more about American wilderness than when you started.
What it lacks is the inner stakes. Bryson is hiking out of curiosity, not crisis; there is no dead mother, no marriage in ruins, and he does not pretend otherwise. He also skips large sections of the trail, which he is upfront about. This is the pick for when you want trail miles and good company without the emotional weight, or for a reader (or trip companion) who would bounce off Wild's heaviness.
Read this if you want the gold standard of the unflinching family memoir.
Mary Karr's 1995 memoir of her childhood in a swampy east Texas oil town is the book that launched the modern confessional memoir boom, the wave Wild later rode. Karr's material is rough (a mother married seven times who was once committed after a psychotic episode, a hard-drinking father, sexual assault recounted plainly), but her voice is what you read her for: profane, exact, darkly funny, with a poet's ear. Readers who underlined Strayed's sentences will underline Karr's more.
This is the least journey-shaped book on the list; it stays in childhood and in Texas, and redemption comes only in glimpses. It is also tougher than Wild in its darkest scenes. Choose it when what you admired in Strayed was the writing itself and the refusal to look away. If it lands, Karr's follow-ups Cherry and Lit (the latter covering her own alcoholism and recovery, very much Wild terrain) continue the story.
Read this for a light celebrity memoir with a genuinely chaotic childhood behind it.
Drew Barrymore's 2015 essay collection earns its place on a Wild list more than the celebrity label suggests. Barrymore was famous at 7, in nightclubs by 9, in rehab by 13, and legally emancipated from her mother at 14, so the underlying story, a young woman raising herself out of wreckage into a settled life, genuinely rhymes with Strayed's. The book is built as warm, scattered essays (camping misadventures, her father's absence, motherhood) rather than one narrative, and her affection for the people who failed her echoes how Strayed writes about her own family.
Be clear about the register: this is breezy and upbeat, written in a chatty voice that skims where Strayed digs, and it deliberately avoids dwelling on the darkest material, most of which she had already covered in her 1990 teenage memoir Little Girl Lost. There is no wilderness and no real reckoning. Pick it as a palate cleanser between heavier books on this list, not as a substitute for them.
Read this for the cautionary mirror image of Strayed's walk.
Jon Krakauer's 1996 book investigates Christopher McCandless, who gave away his savings after college, cut off his family, wandered the West for two years, and walked into the Alaskan bush in 1992, where he died four months later in an abandoned bus. The pull is the same impulse Wild runs on, a young person in pain trying to walk out of an old life, and Strayed's and McCandless's journeys happened in the same decade, in the same American wilderness-as-salvation tradition. Krakauer, himself a climber who nearly died young, treats McCandless with empathy rather than mockery.
The differences matter: this is reported nonfiction, not memoir, assembled from journals, postcards, and interviews, and it ends in death where Wild ends in a beginning. It is the darker, more argued book, and readers still fight about whether McCandless was a seeker or a fool. Read it when you want the same longing examined from outside, with the ending Strayed was lucky enough to avoid.
Read this only if you want the themes of loss and endurance in a tearjerker novel, told by a dog.
This is the outlier on the list: fiction, no trail, and the narrator is Enzo, an aging dog who believes he will be reincarnated as a human. What it shares with Wild is the emotional core rather than the form. Garth Stein's novel is about surviving the worst stretch of a life (his owner Denny, a race-car driver, loses his wife to cancer and then must fight for his daughter), and like Wild it is openly about grief, persistence, and coming through. The racing-in-the-rain idea, controlling what you can when conditions are against you, does the metaphorical work the PCT does for Strayed.
Know what you are picking up: this is a sentimental crowd-pleaser, engineered to make you cry, with none of memoir's rough edges or Strayed's self-implication. Readers who loved Wild for its honesty sometimes find this manipulative; readers who loved it for the catharsis often adore it. Best for dog people, book clubs, and anyone who wants the feelings without another true story for a while.
What is the closest book to Wild by Cheryl Strayed?
Tracks by Robyn Davidson is the closest real match: a young woman's solo 1,700-mile trek across the Australian desert, written with the same mix of physical ordeal and self-reckoning, and Strayed has named it as an inspiration. For the emotional side of Wild rather than the trail, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is the strongest pairing.
Did Cheryl Strayed write anything else like Wild?
Yes. Tiny Beautiful Things collects her anonymous Dear Sugar advice columns and carries the same voice and hard-won wisdom; many readers love it even more than Wild. Torch, her earlier autobiographical novel, reworks her mother's death in fiction, and Brave Enough gathers quotations from her writing. Wild remains her only trail memoir.
Is Wild a true story, and how accurate is the movie?
Wild is a memoir of Strayed's real 1995 hike of more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, told from memory and her trail journals. The 2014 film with Reese Witherspoon, adapted by Nick Hornby, is faithful to the book's events and structure, though the book goes much deeper into her mother's death and the years before the hike.
I loved the hiking parts of Wild. What should I read next?
Go to the trail books: Tracks for a solo expedition with real stakes, A Walk in the Woods for a funny Appalachian Trail companion, and Into the Wild for the darker side of seeking salvation in wilderness. Beyond this list, thru-hikers often recommend Carrot Quinn's Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart, a PCT memoir written after Wild made the trail famous.
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