Nearly 2,000 people thronged an Oregon college auditorium for an appearance by the author of "Wild," hours after a movie based on the best-selling memoir about a thousand-mile hike earned two Oscar nominations.
Cheryl Strayed wrote the book about her walk along the Pacific Crest Trail in 1995 and described it Thursday night to an overflow audience at Oregon State University.
It was the largest crowd at the university's LaSells Stewart Center for such an event, college official Shelly Signs said. Hundreds watched on monitors in the lobby and another auditorium, the Corvallis Gazette-Times reported.
Oscar nominations were announced earlier in the day: Reese Witherspoon was named for her performance as Strayed, and Laura Dern for hers as Strayed's mother.
"How could this even be possible? It makes me want to cry," Strayed said. "It's astounding to me that one day people playing me and my mom would be nominated for an Oscar."
The book describes how Strayed reacted to her mother's death from lung cancer, and how she walked her way out of a dark time that included adultery and heroin use.
"When she died, I didn't know how to live," Strayed said. "In my sorrow I lost my way. I got married; I did a lot of things married people shouldn't do. … Well, I did a lot of things single people shouldn't do, except in moderation."
Looking for a way out of her mental state, she hiked the California and Oregon segments of the trail that runs along the mountainous spine of the West Coast from Mexico to Canada.
The university audience cheered and clapped for Strayed's stories and asked questions about mother-daughter relations, her approach to writing and her work as an advice columnist.
Strayed began writing "Wild" in 2008.
As the book was being prepared for publication, in 2012, Strayed sent a copy to Witherspoon, who bought the rights before it hit the shelves.
Six weeks after release, the film has taken in $30 million.
Strayed had a small part, as a pickup truck driver who drops off Witherspoon at the starting point of her hike.
And she had a line: "Good luck."
Harvey Weinstein hit with new sex crime charge in New York
Harvey Weinstein pleaded not guilty Wednesday to a new sex crime charge in New York, as he awaits retrial in his landmark #MeToo case.
Details of the new allegations were not immediately available. He was charged with committing a criminal sex act.
The jailed ex-movie mogul has long maintained that any sexual activity was consensual.
Prosecutors revealed last week that Weinstein had been indicted on additional sex crime charges that weren't part of the case that led to his now-overturned 2020 conviction. But the new indictment was sealed until his arraignment.
Prosecutors have said that the grand jury heard evidence of up to three alleged assaults — two in hotels in the Tribeca neighborhood and one at a lower Manhattan residential building. The purported incidents took place from the mid-2000s to 2016, prosecutors said.
But it's not clear whether any of those allegations underlie the new indictment.
While bracing for the new charges, Weinstein also is awaiting retrial after New York state's highest court this spring overturned his 2020 conviction on rape and sexual assault charges involving two women. The high court, called the Court of Appeals, ordered a new trial, which is tentatively scheduled to begin Nov. 12.
The Court of Appeals ruled that the then-trial judge unfairly allowed testimony against him based on allegations that were not part of the case. That judge's term expired in 2022, and he is no longer on the bench.
Prosecutors have said they'll seek to fold the new charges into the retrial, but Weinstein's lawyers say it should be a separate case.
Weinstein, who also was convicted in 2022 in a Los Angeles rape case, remains behind bars while awaiting his New York retrial.
Weinstein,... Read More