THE WILDER WAY

Similar to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), zu Beck’s debut memoir begins when the unhappily married Londoner blows up her life with substance abuse and infidelity to strike out on a grueling, long-distance hike in the remote wilderness to find herself. But true to the title, zu Beck takes it much further. She spends the next decade (so far) traveling around remote parts of the world, challenging herself with physical endurance tests like ultramarathons while cultivating a YouTube following and a job hosting a travel show for National Geographic. Along the way, she explores ways that travel morphs her worldview. Watching friends announce wedding engagements and pregnancies on social media forces her to reckon with whether she’s cut out for domestic life. A few romantic flings make her question her desire for a lifelong partner. Realizing she’s afforded privileges that women living in the countries she visits could never experience both humbles and embarrasses her. Yet she rarely wavers from her resolve to keep traveling. “Every meal I ordered at a street food stall without questioning its provenance felt like another step away from the à la carte dinners in London’s Shoreditch,” she writes. “Every turn of the train’s wheels on Asian railroads ushered me further from the dreaded daily commute. Every night in a backpacker hostel or aboard a sleeper train was a world away from the warm marital bed I’d once shared with someone.” Frustratingly impulsive and naïve at times, zu Beck ultimately proves to be a captivating storyteller, especially when recounting her immersive adventures working at a horse camp in Mongolia, living with an indigenous family in the Passu Cones mountains of Pakistan near the Chinese border, or riding out the Covid-19 lockdown on a remote island in Yemen.