The Wild Truth by Carine McCandless (review)

In her 2014 memoir, The Wild Truth, Carine McCandless addresses many of the questions that the audience is left with after reading John Krakauer’s 1996 Into the Wild. Nearly two decades later, Carine reveals that she asked Krakauer to leave out some of the most startling circumstances, many revealed by letters that Chris had written to her, explaining Chris’s decision to remove himself from society. Carine’s account follows Sean Penn’s 2007 award-winning film adaptation of Krakauer’s book. Penn’s visual depiction of Chris’s story captivated viewers with a solid casting of characters, breathtaking cinematography, and an original soundtrack by Eddie Vedder. Krakauer’s book, Penn’s film, and Carine’s memoir, when analyzed together as a three-part account of Chris’s quest, represent three different perspectives on his story, yet each perspective originates, in some sense, with Carine. This firsthand perspective renders her memoir as a credible account of previously unknown or unconfirmed details surrounding Chris’s disappearance and the abuse that she and Chris had sought to leave behind.

Carine portrays herself as having a close bond with her brother Chris, one in which only the two could truly understand each other. Since they had witnessed their parents’ violent outbursts that were often directed at them, the two siblings were compelled to withhold information that they felt could not be disclosed to others, convinced that no one would believe them. In The Wild Truth, Carine admits that she knew of her brother’s plans to “divorce” himself from their parents through the letters that he wrote her, although she was not quite sure at the time how he would do so. Carine also discusses her brother’s disillusionment when he visited family friends, who revealed the truth about his father’s first wife, Marcia McCandless, a woman who did manage to remove herself and Chris’s and Carine’s half siblings from the abusive grip of their father. Walt McCandless had been living a double-life, maintaining two separate households before Marcia left the immediate picture and Billie McCandless donned the role of Walt’s sole partner. After this change in the family dynamic, readers of Carine’s memoir learn that Billie regularly put Chris and Carine in the car to go look for a new house where they could start over without Walt; however, Billie never followed through with these promises of a more stable life for her children. She simply could not break out of the cycle of abuse.

The domestic abuse Carine’s reveals in The Wild Truth not only sheds light on more of Chris’s story, but it also details Carine’s struggles and determination not to follow in the footsteps of her parents, specifically her mother. Ultimately, Carine’s narrative primarily focuses on her life and how her family influenced and later tangentially interacted in it. This striking account of abuse, heartbreak, and triumph follows Carine through failed relationships, marriages, bonding with her half siblings, and her plunge into parenthood. The book is at times difficult to follow, often replicating the fractured feel of Krakauer’s and Penn’s presentations of Chris’s story, sometimes with characters who appear quickly to be explained and developed later after the narrative has moved on to a different topic. However, what some might find distracting in the narration is quickly recovered by Carine’s vivid and engaging descriptions, which are further elaborated by her inclusion of many color photographs of family and friends throughout the book. For anyone who has followed the Chris McCandless story throughout the last two decades, The Wild Truth is an essential read. It fills in the gaps that Krakauer’s and Penn’s representations leave behind, occasionally correcting minor details that occur with the dramatization of most adaptations to film. Most importantly, Carine McCandless provides a perspective that is no longer filtered through that of another person, and, in that sense, one may find a definitive perspective on Chris McCandless’s story in The Wild Truth. [End Page 216...