Torch by Cheryl Strayed

A deeply compelling, wonderfully crafted story about a journey into, through, and past grief.
Elizabeth Berg

About the Book


The doctor didnt say cancer at least she didnt hear him say it. She heard him say oranges
and peas and radishes and ovaries and lungs and liver. So begins Torch, the story of thirty-
eight-year-old Teresa Rae Wood, an exuberant radio personality in her small Minnesota town,
and the bewildered family she suddenly leaves behind her two nearly grown but still
rebellious children, Claire and Joshua, and her common-law husband, Bruce. With a deep
appreciation for the complexities of love and the shifting rhythms of grief, Cheryl Strayed offers
a finely wrought tale of uncommon candor, wisdom, and power.


A deeply honest novel of life after catastrophe, of intimacy lost and found. O, The Oprah
Magazine


Beautifully written and authentic in its portrayal of the unexpected fallout a family death can
engender. People

About the Author


Cheryl Strayeds award-winning stories and essays have appeared in more than a dozen
magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, Allure, Self, The Sun, and Nerve. Widely
anthologized, her work is featured in The Best New American Voices 2003 and has been selected
twice for The Best American Essays. Raised in Minnesota, Strayed has worked as a political
organizer for womens advocacy groups and was an outreach worker at a sexual violence center
in Minneapolis. She holds an MFA from the Syracuse University Graduate Creative Writing
Program. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and their two children.

Questions for Discussion


We hope the following questions will stimulate discussion for reading groups and provide a
deeper understanding of Torch for every reader.


1. Torch has been compared to Joan Didions memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. Have you
read other fiction or nonfiction works that share the themes of Torch? What are the challenges of
dealing with issues of grief in fiction? In nonfiction?


2. The novel takes place in Midden, Minnesota, a fictional small midwestern town. How does the
setting of the novel inform the characters and their actions? Would you agree that the town
serves as a character in the novel and if so, how?


3. Teresa is the host of a local radio show called Modern Pioneers. In what ways does this show
reflect her personality and her family? How does the radio show affect the characters throughout
the course of the novel?


4. Teresa flees a bad marriage and has a long, loving relationship with Bruce in which she
believes she is setting a good example for her children. What is your opinion of Bruce as a
husband and father?


5. Teresas children, Claire and Joshua, have a good but sometimes strained relationship with
their mother at the start of the novel. How does their relationship change when they learn Teresa
has cancer?


6. Explore the reactions of Bruce, Claire, and Joshua to Teresas diagnosis. How did you feel
about their actions? Are they typical of someone facing tragedy or misfortune? How would you
act if you found yourself in the same situation?


7. In the hospital, Claire and Bruce meet the grief counselor Pepper Jones-Kachinsky, who
preaches strength through faith. How is Claires response to Pepper different from that of Bruce?
What role does faith play in the novel and in your own life?


8. Teresas death prompts each of the main characters to choose a new path for themselves.
Bruce takes the most dramatic step, while Claire and Joshua struggle in their brother/sister
relationship and in their romantic relationships. How is their decision making complicated by
Teresas absence from their lives?


9. Although Bruce is their stepfather, he has a very strong bond with Claire and Joshua
throughout his marriage to Teresa. How does Bruces relationship to Claire and Joshua change
after Teresas death? How is the relationship complicated by the fact that he is not their
biological father?


10. The author Cheryl Strayed writes of Claire, She came to see that her grief did not have an
end, or if it did, she would not be delivered there. Grief was not a road or a river or a sea but a
world, and she would have to live there now. How does this statement coincide with or differ
from your own thoughts on grieving? Did you identify with the thoughts and actions of Bruce,
Joshua, or Claire?


11. Although Torch is about the death of a loved one, it is also a story of a family confronting
their grief and trying to heal. How would you describe the overall tone of the novel?


12. The novel begins with an epigraph from Jane Eyre: Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if
you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be
required to bear. Do the characters believe in fate and its effect on their lives? What is your
view on fate in your own life?

A Conversation with Cheryl Strayed


What can you tell us about the genesis of Torch?


I began to write the novel in its most rudimentary form more than ten years ago, when I was in
my early twenties, shortly after my mother died young and of cancer, like the character of
Teresa in the novel. My mothers death and my familys subsequent grief, which I fictionalized
in Torch, lent itself to the kind of deep character excavation I was compelled to do as a writer.
Ive always been most interested in exploring relationships and delving into what motivates us,
what complicates us, what crushes and saves us and, quite naturally, Ive drawn from my own
life experiences to do that in both my fiction and my nonfiction. The personal essays Ive written
for magazines like Allure, Self, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine,
and The Sun all explore the same kinds of themes that I explore in Torch. Having said that, real
life is only the raw material from which the story is spun and so the process of writing is not
cathartic, but instead creative. Certainly, there are scenes in Torch that are close to my heart, but
I didnt write Torch in order to transform myself, but rather to reach those who would be
transformed by reading it.


Teresas radio show, Modern Pioneers!, serves as a central motif throughout Torch, binding
Bruce and Joshua and Claire together even when theyve come profoundly apart, and also
literally bringing Teresas voice back long after she has died. How did you get the idea to
use the radio in that way?


Like Claire and Joshua in Torch, I spent a good deal of my adolescence living without electricity,
which meant without a television. What we had instead was a radio that my stepfather hooked up
to a car battery. We could get the community station KAXE from Grand Rapids,
Minnesota, the very one Ive written about in Torch, though Ive fictionalized it a bit. Its packed
full of eclectic programs hosted by locals who essentially make it up as they go along. When I
got older and moved away from home, I spent time in a number of small towns across the United
States in New Mexico, Wyoming, and Massachusetts, to name a few and in each of those
places the radio served as the same kind of lifeline, the same quirky, intelligent, endearing voice
of, by, and for the community. Those radio stations are a real and important part of life in much
of rural and small-town America, and so it seemed only right that that reality be reflected in my
novel.


Plus, I am a huge radio fan. When we read books, its largely up to us to construct the visual
world of the story. Radio has that same power to provoke our imaginations. I had a mad crush on
one of the hosts on an NPR show until I saw him in person, not because of the way he looked but
because I had constructed his persona based on his voice the visual component changed all
that. I wanted Teresa to work that same kind of mystery and magic on her listeners in Torch, to
belong to her community more powerfully than an ordinary citizen would and, more important,
to allow those who loved her most Bruce and Claire and Joshua to experience the pain and
the joy of hearing her voice after she was dead.


Was it a challenge for you to take up a subject so fraught with emotion?


The challenge had less to do with writing Torch than it does with talking about it. When people
hear the words cancer, grief, or loss in the context of a novel, they often have preconceived ideas
about what they are about to read. There is a rule in contemporary literary fiction that ones
writing must never be sentimental, which often results in writing that lacks sentiment entirely.
And so we have a number of stories about grief in which the actual loss is never addressed
directly and the emotions of the characters are portrayed only furtively, often leaving the reader
rather indifferent in response. On the other hand, theres an enormous body of work in
writing, film, and television in which cancer and grief are depicted in ways that really are too
sentimental and melodramatic for the reader or viewer to have any kind of authentic reaction. In
Torch, I set out to do something different, to write with sincerity and complexity, with emotion
as well as restraint, and, of course, with humor. I write literary realism and so I wanted my novel
to seem like life, which means that it had to contain the range of emotions we experience when
we suffer a deep loss. There are light, hilarious moments, as well as terribly sad ones. There is
the beautiful as well as the gritty truth. All of these things are pushed up against one another in
Torch. For example, in the scene when Bruce is in Teresas hospital room the morning she dies,
he isnt sitting by her bedside weeping and professing his love; instead he is forcibly jamming
green Jell-O into her mouth, trying desperately brutally, as well as somewhat comically to
keep her alive. He doesnt tell her its OK to die; he insists that it isnt. But then he lies down
next to her and gently holds her. Ultimately, he gives in to the only thing he has, which is his
love.


The setting of the novel the small town of Midden, in rural Coltrap County, Minnesota
has the presence of something like a character, as do the collective community members
and businesses that make up the town and county. What made you want to write about
these people and this particular place?


I grew up in northern Minnesota in a place much like the fictional setting in Torch. By the time I
began to think seriously of myself as a writer when I was nineteen or twenty I lived in an
entirely different landscape and community as a college student in the Twin Cities. The children
of the middle and upper classes become more like their parents and the adults in their community
when they go off to college, but children of the working and poor classes like me become
less so. In the course of attaining an education and exploring the world more broadly, I was in
some ways estranging myself from the people Id loved and known best in my life. And yet this
isnt to say that the people I loved and knew best or the place I came from was in any way small
or uninteresting or less complicated and sophisticated than the urban, more cultured world I was
beginning to occupy. In fact, the opposite was true, and I could see that more clearly once I lived
outside of that world. There are riches there, stories to tell. Its the landscape I feel most
connected to, provoked by, and passionate about, so it was a natural choice for me to set Torch
there.


That difference you speak of, between urban culture and rural culture, serves as a thematic
undercurrent throughout the novel.


Yes, and its rooted, ultimately, in class. Like many rural communities across America, Midden
is a place where there are two clearly defined groups of people: the locals and the visitors. In
Torch, as in real life, the locals refer to the visitors as city apes, a term that captures the
lighthearted resentment the locals have toward the visitors, who almost always have more money
than the locals. Their houses, which sit empty three quarters of the year, are bigger and newer,
their cars are fancier and shinier. So the visitors have a material power that the locals dont have,
and yet there is also a way in which the locals are superior, or at least believe themselves to be,
and that is the power that comes from living a hardscrabble existence deeply rooted to the land.
The people of Coltrap County, like the real Minnesota county in which I came of age, are
generally poorer, less educated, less well-traveled, and less fashionably dressed than the urban
people who make places like Coltrap County their vacation playground. Because of that they are
branded hicks and rednecks and country bumpkins, and yet there is also a reverse sort of
discrimination. A phrase I heard a lot growing up was book knowledge, and it was almost always
spoken with a fair amount of scorn. Books and formal education were not to be trusted entirely.
More valuable was the practical knowledge gained in the course of a life lived hard. In Torch,
Claire straddles that urban/rural divide as she goes off and becomes educated, caught between
two worlds, while Joshua has to confront the fact that hes never going to leave Midden after all,
despite his claims that he will soon move to his much-idealized California. And characters like
Bruce and Leonard and Mardell, who rely on the business of the so-called city apes for their
livelihood, struggle with that divide in a very different way.

For Further Reading


The following books may be of interest to readers of Torch:


Knitting by Anne Bartlett

Seek the Living by Ashley Warlick

Long for This World by Michael Byers

Wild Decembers by Edna OBrien

A Seahorse Year by Stacey DErasmo