Woman finds long-lost sister after reading her memoir ‘Wild’

When American author Cheryl Strayed hiked the Pacific Crest Trail in 1995 and wrote about her experience in her 2012 best-selling memoir Wild, her story touched many people who said they felt connected to her. But it turns out there was one woman who actually was.

"The human experience is full of serendipity and surprise and situations taking a turn that you didn't expect," Strayed tells NPR. "As shocked as I was to be reading that email ... I also had this feeling that I knew that was coming."

The email that Strayed refers to is one she received in the summer of 2012. In it, a woman describes how the two are related, namely that they share the same father. The woman came to learn this based on Strayed's descriptions of their father in her memoir, even though their father was unnamed.

Her half-sister, interested in travel books, borrowed Wild from the library and as Strayed describes, "She was halfway into chapter one when she said she sat bolt upright in bed and realized that we had the same father."

http://ca.shine.yahoo.com/blogs/shine-on/woman-finds-long-lost-sister-reading-her-memoir-191144749.html

On what tipped her half-sister off

"I haven't asked her what specifically was the thing that tipped her off. ... What I think is really interesting is frankly the things that she wrote to me about her experience with my father (that]) I recognized. ... We so often think, OK if we don't name somebody they won't be recognizable in what you write, but actually I've had the opposite experience, not just with my father in the book, but other people. I think that one of the things the writer does obviously is really try to describe accurately not just the way somebody looks but the way they are, the way they seem to others around them. My impression is that that is what my sister felt when she first came to the descriptions about my father — about our father."

On the unexpected ways that life unfolds

"I think that the trick to writing a memoir and the trick to writing fiction is always to have this consciousness of what it really means to be human, and what the human experience is. And the human experience is full of serendipity and surprise and situations taking a turn that you didn't expect.

http://www.npr.org/2013/09/08/219754257/the-wild-story-of-cheryl-strayed-and-her-long-lost-half-sister