FERAL

A freelance travel journalist drops out of the rat race to spend a year visiting every national park in the U.S.

At 32, Pennington walked away from an unfulfilling job as an assistant to Los Angeles executives to embark on the wilderness tour of her dreams. “I had grown weary of spending my waking hours managing the lives of other, more successful people,” she writes. The author outfitted a minivan with a mattress and all the “creature comforts” she could cram inside and headed to her first stop in Joshua Tree National Park. There she encountered her first obstacles: worries over personal safety and her ability to handle the adventure she had chosen. Gradually, deeper anxieties involving the inner “feral child” who had felt abandoned by her parents began to emerge. Pennington believed that the natural world that had saved her from despair once before would help her find balance, but her obsession with pushing limits and the unexpected onset of the Covid-19 pandemic weeks after she started left her feeling more vulnerable than she expected. The journey—which took her all over the continental U.S., Hawaii, Alaska, and the Virgin Islands—revealed that a relationship she thought would lead to marriage had been a union of incompatible opposites. Forced to confront the loneliness she feared, Pennington continued her travels to the end despite the mounting personal uncertainties, the risks posed by the pandemic, and the emotional health that made her feel like she could “no longer trust the narrative of [her] own mind.” The author’s unflinching honesty and the boldness of her inner and outer journeys are the two great strengths of a book that sometimes overreaches with too-florid natural descriptions. Despite this flaw, the memoir still succeeds in offering a moving portrait of a woman who came into her own by learning to let go.

Fierce, candid reading.