Both literary criticism and memoir, Alden Jones’s The Wanting Was a Wilderness serves to deconstruct the craft through Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild, and to construct her own narrative ... The Wanting Was a Wilderness alternates between craft and personal narrative until the penultimate chapters of false endings, where Jones arrives at the thing she has been seeking to both prove and reveal: her truth. It flows through catharsis in the same way it must have felt to write, for the shell to be cracked open and the reality uncovered. An important function of memoir, Jones contends, is a persona and the ability for that character to be sympathetic and/or redeemable. Like a persona, she admits to feigning one in her daily life for the sake of her children and life as she knew it — an act that every one of us can empathize with. Lying to ourselves feels easier than having to uproot our entire system, put one foot in front of the other, and walk an unforaged path; but to actualize contentment, we have to face what is right in front of us.
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