Reviewed by Ian Munnelly

What makes a good memoir? Much ink has been spilled on the question of how craft transforms one's life material into something interesting to others. But no one has done it quite like Alden Jones in her new critical memoir, The Wanting Was a Wilderness, in which Jones takes a scalpel to Cheryl Strayed's Wild, and then—having pinpointed what transformed the story of a hike into a massively popular memoir—simultaneously composes her own memoir, essentially testing her own theories on craft as part of the text.

The central question of The Wanting Was a Wilderness appears in its first chapter: "Strayed wrote a page-turner about the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other. . . . How, exactly, did she do it?" Jones, the author of the acclaimed memoir The Blind Masseuse (2013), takes a specified look at one celebrated book's beginning, persona, restraint, chronology, and voice. What begins as a straightforward critical approach quickly morphs into something else, and the reader finds themselves engrossed in a piece of Jones's history, traveling with her through her own eighty-five-day wilderness journey that begins on the North Carolina section of the Appalachian Trail. Much like Strayed, who uses her long journey on the Pacific Crest Trail to find her way back to herself after the devastating loss of her mother, Jones arrives on the Appalachian Trail during a period of her life in which she has been avoiding, deliberating, and trying to come to terms with some tumultuous aspects of her personal life. With utter skill and control, Jones carries readers from her own story to Strayed's and back again, creating twin memoirs—one about Jones's time on the trail, and the other about her process of writing this book. If it sounds complicated, that's because it is; and yet The Wanting Was a Wilderness is a true page-turner, its sections linking seamlessly.

Jones argues that the reader's emotional connection to Cheryl Strayed's persona drives such profound interest in Wild. Because of Strayed's ability to access and communicate her psyche on the trail, Wild becomes more than just the celebration of the physical achievement of hiking such an arduous path. As Jones points out, it is not Strayed's achievement that connects us to her character, but rather her failures and uncertainties on the trail and in her previous life. Mimicking that approach, both as an homage to effective narrative nonfiction writing and as a testament to the truth, Jones's story is riddled with self-doubt and the desire for personal growth. In the chapter "This is Not the Book I Sat Down to Write" Jones describes the rocky process of creating The Wanting Was a Wilderness, including a divorce with three young kids that threw both her life and the book off track. Jones explores how drastically certain projects can change and how to write through some of life's brutal surprises in the sort of conversational tone reminiscent of Stephen King's On Writing. 

Jones is trustworthy as a critic, but we also understand her to be human, and flawed. In "The Urge to Revise the Past," Jones reveals some of the difficult choices she made when rendering her young self as a character. She later offers up some scenarios of how she might have failed to properly end The Wanting Was a Wilderness, with episodes that might provide tidy resolution, but that only approximate the truth. Form follows function: If you are not true to yourself about who you are and have been, Jones suggests, you can't write a good memoir. Despite the critical expertise that can be gained from Jones's headier analysis, by the end of The Wanting Was a Wilderness, my investment as a reader was primarily in Jones's character and the revelations of her personal process. 

The Wanting Was a Wilderness paints an earnest portrait of a searching nineteen-year-old woman and of the writer she later becomes. Jones's analysis of the tools Strayed's memoir uses within the context of her own story creates a clear and thrilling writing lesson that shows by example. This book invites readers to know a piece of Alden Jones and, in the way of all good memoirs, to come to know a piece of themselves. If you were to write a memoir, would you know how to start your journey? If not, The Wanting Was a Wilderness offers a luminous map.