The problem for readers is that clues to Chris's motives and demise come fast and furious up front in the book. Chris, looking so much older than his age, wouldn't smile. Troubling scenes of sadistic abuse, of brutal fights and drunken rages, and belt whippings and beatings, will repeatedly send readers to the book's front cover to stare again at the sad photo of little Chris and Carine in their Sunday best. Much of the book's first 50 riveting pages paint an appalling picture of the dysfunctional McCandless family before Chris escaped to college. That she's spilling the story now probably tells you how that went. She held out hope Walt and Billie would change. While Carine told Krakauer all of this as he researched Into the Wild, and showed him rants Chris wrote her from college (vowing to "divorce" his parents), she made Krakauer promise he wouldn't disclose the nightmare. To make matters worse, Walt, a successful aerospace engineer, led two lives - fathering two separate households of children almost simultaneously. Their mother, Billie, was his main victim, but also a pathetic enabler and an abuser. The grim reality Carine reveals is that their father, Walt McCandless, was a volatile psychopath who abused his kids physically and psychologically.
"People think they understand our story because they know how it ended, but they don't know how it all began," she writes, describing her disturbing visit to the house in Annandale, Va., where she and Chris grew up. In her new memoir, The Wild Truth, Chris's younger sister Carine McCandless promises to answer these questions. What did Chris McCandless really leave behind? And why?
#Into the wild book sister movie
But neither Krakauer's best seller nor Penn's acclaimed movie directly answered haunting questions about this ill-fated odyssey. In 2007, a film adaptation of the book, directed by Sean Penn, further aggrandized the Thoreau-like mystique surrounding this free-spirited idealist. In search of solitude and peace of mind, the 24-year-old ventured into the Alaskan wilderness where, alone, desperate and sick from eating toxic roots, he starved to death. Nearly 20 years ago, Jon Krakauer's stunning book Into the Wild moved many readers to embrace the fatally flawed romantic adventure of Chris McCandless, a college grad who cut ties with his affluent family and abandoned worldly possessions to wander across the country.
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