To face her problems she abandoned them. She put on a backpack and set off on a solo 1700km tramp up the US north-west coast. Although she always wanted to be a writer, it didn't occur to her to write about her life-changing adventure until much later. The resulting book is more a guide to surviving grief than a guide to conquering the Pacific Crest Trail.
"The point of Wild is not, 'Look at me I'm so interesting I did a big hike'," she says.
"The point of it is essentially the meaning I brought to bear on that experience. That took some time for me to understand."
Strayed's cameo appears early on in the final cut of the movie. She plays a kindly driver dropping a hitchhiking Witherspoon off at the beginning of the tramp. In a poetic moment of life coming full circle she wishes her younger, tormented self "good luck".
Strayed is now 46, married with two children and living in Portland, Oregon. Twenty years after stepping on to that trail she is walking the red carpet. With Reese Witherspoon nominated for an Oscar for best actress and Laura Dern, who plays her mother, nominated for best supporting actress, Strayed is on the guest list for the Academy Awards.
"It's very exciting," she says. "I'm always laughing when I'm standing in front of all those photographers snapping all at once."
The book had yet to be published when Strayed got in touch with a film agent in the hope of sparking Hollywood interest.
"At the top of our list was Reese Witherspoon because she's such a good actress and we also heard that she was interested in strong roles for women."
Strayed sent Witherspoon the manuscript and within days the pair were on the phone. Witherspoon liked the project so much she started a production company and produced it herself.
In Wild, Strayed espouses the power of storytelling. As a woman alone in the wilderness for three months she refused to feel vulnerable. She addressed her fears by telling herself she was strong and brave and soon found she was more likely to encounter kindness and generosity from strangers than threat.
"We need to start telling ourselves truer stories," says Strayed, pointing out there is no dearth of strong women in our everyday lives so it makes no sense that they are missing on the big screen.
"We've been told the wrong stories by some of the most powerful storytellers - that means Hollywood. I love that Wild is part of a kind of revision in saying we're going to make room in our culture for stories about women who are complicated, who are unapologetic and are willing to take some risks in our lives."
Strayed calls her mother's death her origin story. It burns through her writing and so lies at the heart of her career success.
Her first novel Torch, published in 2006, is the tale of a family torn apart after the young mother dies of cancer.
In 2012, the year Wild was published, Strayed was outed as the agony aunt on literary website The Rumpus. Her unusually personal responses to readers garnered a cult following. A collection of the columns is published as Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Life and Love from Someone Who's Been There. Recurring themes are: life's complicated; be honest with yourself; only you can change your life. She knows because she did.
The name Strayed is no coincidence. She legally changed her name after her divorce, shortly before setting off on the hike. She feels it fits as perfectly today as it did two decades ago.
"I didn't choose it for its negative aspects, for the sorrow that it might contain. I chose it because I felt it expressed not only who I was but who I am.
I do think that so much of being a writer, being somebody without parents or without that perfect happy family background, you do have to forge your own path and push in directions that are not the known way. So I love that that name reflects that."
Who: Cheryl Strayed, writer of Wild, the book adapted for the Reese Witherspoon movie of the same name.
When and where: At cinemas now.
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