Cheryl Strayed Biography

Cheryl Strayed is an American memoirist, novelist, essayist and podcast host. The author of four books, her award-winning writing has been published widely in anthologies and major magazines.

Cheryl Strayed Age

Cheryl Strayed was born on September 17, 1968, in Spangler, Pennsylvania, United States. Cheryl Strayed is 50 years old as of 2018.

Cheryl Strayed Net worth

Cheryl Strayed earns her income from her work as a memoirist, novelist, essayist and podcast host. She also earns her income from the Awards industry. She also earns her income from the businesses that she has invested in. She has an estimated net worth of $ 1 million.

Cheryl Strayed Husband

Cheryl Strayed is married to Marco Littig on August 1988, a month before her 20th birthday. But they divorced in 1995, shortly before she started hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. She was later married to married filmmaker Brian Lindstrom in August 1999.

The couples were blessed with two children with whom they live with in the east Portland, Oregon, where Strayed has lived since the mid-1990s. Her daughter, Bobbi Strayed Lindstrom, played the younger version of Strayed in the film adaptation of Wild.

Cheryl Strayed Education

Cheryl Strayed graduated from McGregor High School a high school in McGregor, Minnesota. She then joined the University of Minnesota.

In 1986, when she was 17 years old, she graduated from McGregor High School in McGregor, Minnesota, where she was a track and cross country runner, cheerleader, and homecoming queen.

She loosely based the fictional Coltrap County in her novel Torch on McGregor and Aitkin County. Strayed attended a college at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, but by her sophomore year, she transferred to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree, graduating magna cum laude with a double major in English and Women’s Studies.

Cheryl Strayed Author

Cheryl Strayed wrote her first novels books Torch which was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February 2006 to positive critical reviews.

The torch was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award and selected by The Oregonian as one of the top ten books of 2006 by writers living in the Pacific Northwest. In October 2012, Torch was re-issued by Vintage Books with a new introduction by Strayed.

She worked as a long-time feminist activist in her twenties and as a political organizer for the Abortion Rights Council of Minnesota, which is now called Minnesota NARAL, and also for Women Against Military Madness, a feminist peace and justice nonprofit organization in Minneapolis–Saint Paul.

She served on the first board of directors for Vida: Women in Literary Arts and has been active in many feminist and progressive causes. Strayed’s second book, the memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, was published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf on March 20, 2012.

It has been translated into 30 languages. The week of its publication, Wild debuted at number 7 on the New York Times Best Seller list in hardcover non-fiction. In June 2012, Oprah Winfrey announced that Wild was her first selection for her new Oprah’s Book Club 2.0.

The next month Wild reached number 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, a spot it held for seven consecutive weeks.  The paperback edition of Wild, published by Vintage Books in March 2013, spent 126 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list.

The book has also been a bestseller around the world in the UK, Germany, Australia, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and elsewhere. Wild won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Oregon Book Award.

In July 2012, Vintage Books published Strayed’s third book: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar. The book debuted in the advice and self-help category on the New York Times Best Seller list at number 5 and it has also been published internationally.

Tiny Beautiful Things is a selection of Strayed’s popular “Dear Sugar” advice columns, which she wrote for no pay for the literary website The Rumpus from 2010 to 2012.

Her fourth book, is known as Brave Enough, was published in the United States by Knopf on October 27, 2015, and in the United Kingdom a week later by Atlantic Books. It debuted in the advice and self-help category on the New York Times Best Seller list at number 10.

Cheryl Strayed Award

  • Goodreads Choice Awards Best Memoir & Autobiography

Cheryl Strayed Family

Cheryl Strayed Strayed was born in Spangler, Pennsylvania, to Barbara Anne “Bobbi” (née Young; 1945–1991) and Ronald Nyland. At age six, she moved with her family to Chaska, Minnesota.

Her parents divorced soon after. At the age of 13, she moved with her mother and stepfather Glenn Lambrecht, along with her two siblings, Karen and Leif, to rural Aitkin County, where they lived in a house that they had built themselves on 40 acres.

The house did not have electricity or running water for the first few years. Indoor plumbing was installed after Strayed moved away for college. She later reconnected with her half-sister from a previous relationship with her father.

In 1986, at the age of 17, Strayed graduated from McGregor High School in McGregor, Minnesota, where she was a track and cross country runner, cheerleader, and homecoming queen.

In March 1991, when Strayed was a senior in college, her mother, Bobbi Lambrecht, died suddenly of lung cancer at the age of 45. Strayed has described this loss as her “genesis story”.

She has written about her mother’s death and her grief in each of her books and several of her essays. He worked as a waitress, youth advocate, political organizer, temporary office employee, and emergency medical technician throughout her 20s and early 30s while writing and often traveling around the United States.

In 2002, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing from Syracuse University, where she was mentored by writers George Saunders, Arthur Flowers, Mary Gaitskill, and Mary Caponegro.

Cheryl Strayed Body measurements

  • Height 175 cm (5 ft 8.9 in)
  • Weight 53 kg (117 lb)
  • Bra size 34B
  • Waist size 86 cm (34 in)
  • Hips size 90 cm (35 in)
  • Shoe size 8 US
  • Dress size 4

Cheryl Strayed Novelist, essayist and podcast host

Cheryl Strayed In addition to her four books Wild, Tiny Beautiful Things, Brave Enough, and Torch, Strayed has published essays in various magazines, including The Washington Post Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Tin House, The Missouri Review, and The Sun Magazine.

Her work has been selected three times for inclusion in The Best American Essays (“Heroin/e” in the 2000 edition, and “The Love of My Life” in the 2003 edition, and “My Uniform” in the 2015 edition). Strayed was the guest editor of The Best American Essays 2013.

She won a Pushcart Prize for her essay “Munro Country,” which was originally published in The Missouri Review. The essay is about a letter Strayed received from Alice Munro when she was a young writer and Munro’s influence on Strayed’s writing.

She wrote the popular advice column to “Dear Sugar” on The Rumpus. She began writing the column in March 2010, when the column’s originator Steve Almond asked her to take over for him.

She wrote the column anonymously until February 14, 2012, when she revealed her identity as “Sugar” at a “Coming Out Party” hosted by the Rumpus at the Verdi Club in San Francisco.

A selection of her columns has been collected in her bestselling book Tiny Beautiful Things. Her memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail details her 1,100-mile hike in 1995 on the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to the Oregon–Washington state line and tells the story of the personal struggles that compelled her to take the hike.

Three months before her memoir was published, actress Reese Witherspoon optioned it for her company, Pacific Standard. Nick Hornby adapted Wild for the screen, with Witherspoon portraying Strayed in the film.

In June 2012, Wild was chosen as the inaugural selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, which is a relaunch of Oprah’s Book Club, which ended in 2011. Winfrey discussed Wild in her video announcement of the new club and interviewed Strayed for a two-hour broadcast of her show Super Soul Sunday on her OWN Network.

She is also a public speaker and often gives lectures about her life and books. She travels internationally to meet at writers retreats and lead writing seminars.

Strayed co-hosted the Dear Sugars podcast for four years with Steve Almond, concluding on September 2018. The podcast was produced by The New York Times and WBUR, Boston’s National Public Radio affiliate.

Cheryl Strayed Books

  • Brave Enough 2015
  • Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail 2012
  • Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar 2012
  • Wild (Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 Digital Edition) 2012
  • Torch (book) 2005

Cheryl Strayed Quotes

“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

“What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do?

What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done? What if I’d actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something?

What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?”

“I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.”

“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

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