Pack Light: A Journey to Find Myself

Curtis debuts with an evocative if scattershot account of hiking the Appalachian trail while grappling with depression and childhood trauma. At the start of the pandemic, Curtis, who was unemployed and recovering from a suicide attempt, decided to hike from Georgia to Maine (“I knew I would be beaten down again and again.... But I also knew that I had to keep walking; if not, I would sink”). By doing so, she hoped to counter exclusionary hiking narratives that centered white people (when she asked an online hiking group whether she’d be safe on the trail as a Black woman, it ignited a storm of racist vitriol that renewed her dedication to her goal). In chapters that alternate between describing life on the trail and her erratic upbringing, Curtis recounts hostile encounters with racist locals, horrifying childhood sexual abuse, and traumatic stints at psychiatric hospitals as a kid and an adult. She’s at her most captivating when she sticks close to the current moment, describing how, among the hikers she fell in with, “government names are typically not spoken. No one wants to know who you were, they want to know who you are” (she adopted the name Dragonsky). However, the frequent shifts between past and present can be jarring, and Curtis too often foregoes insight for a kind of florid imprecision (“I was a flower, buried under the first season’s snow, awaiting the sun to release me”). This has its moments, but it fails to live up to Curtis’s impressive achievement. (May)