Carine McCandless is writing a memoir...

There is a new book by Carine called The Wild Truth. There will be, no doubt, a lot of talk about this book and its contents, so thought I would create a new category for it.
whipper
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Re: Carine McCandless is writing a memoir...

Postby whipper » Sun Dec 22, 2013 3:02 pm

SteveSalmon wrote:For clarity, there was no specificity regarding 'when' she started writing it. I really don't think it matters when. I know I certainly don't care when she started writing it. As always though, we must take what the media regurgitates with a grain of salt. The reporter incorrectly stated that Carine was/is Chris' "only sister" and that's simply not true. He has a few half sisters as well. From what I understand, her 'parents' have no role in ANY of their lives. Walt and Billie have grandchildren that they choose not to have any relationship with as well. That's terrible and speaks volumes of what kind of people they are.
The only positive thing about the 'Back To The Wild' book and video is it shared new photos that had previously never been seen. The final product of both the book AND the video were terrible, cheaply produced, and not surprisingly overpriced to boot. Perhaps the most shameful part was they chose to make Chris the author. I don't think he would've taken part in any of it.
I do find quite a bit of humor in the charity they choose to share profits with. Single moms with children. I wonder who made that decision, the cheating husband or his mistress?

~Steve Salmon

So this whole deal with losing a son and still not having a stable relationship with the other kids and grandkids has taught the parents nothing in my view.. I seen a picture of them on the bus smiling while sitting on the bed? what this smiles because of all the money they are going to make? I can understand why he committed suicide.

whipper
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Re: Carine McCandless is writing a memoir...

Postby whipper » Sun Dec 22, 2013 3:05 pm

Anewanddifferentsun wrote:
SteveSalmon wrote:For clarity, there was no specificity regarding 'when' she started writing it. I really don't think it matters when. I know I certainly don't care when she started writing it. As always though, we must take what the media regurgitates with a grain of salt. The reporter incorrectly stated that Carine was/is Chris' "only sister" and that's simply not true. He has a few half sisters as well. From what I understand, her 'parents' have no role in ANY of their lives. Walt and Billie have grandchildren that they choose not to have any relationship with as well. That's terrible and speaks volumes of what kind of people they are.
The only positive thing about the 'Back To The Wild' book and video is it shared new photos that had previously never been seen. The final product of both the book AND the video were terrible, cheaply produced, and not surprisingly overpriced to boot. Perhaps the most shameful part was they chose to make Chris the author. I don't think he would've taken part in any of it.
I do find quite a bit of humor in the charity they choose to share profits with. Single moms with children. I wonder who made that decision, the cheating husband or his mistress?

~Steve Salmon


Well, THAT press release doesn't specify, but her own words certainly do: "After years of contemplation I am pleased to announce that I am completing a book for publication by Harper Collins Publishers / Harper One in fall 2014. Here is a link to Harper One's full press release... ." She's been writing for quite some time. Whether it was worthy of a publisher until now is another matter. But that's OK. She's not a writer by trade and apparently has little if any post-high school education, so it's understandable that she would struggle a bit.

So is his death going to be a forever thing? someone from the family coming out every so often with new picture and books? I mean is this their income now?

GoNorth
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Re: Carine McCandless is writing a memoir...

Postby GoNorth » Sat Dec 28, 2013 4:24 pm

whipper wrote:I can understand why he committed suicide.


So you believe he did? From all we can know, it still doesn't seem that way to me.
But I agree with you for the rest.
Even though Carine's book might be a different story. Maybe rather an attempt to rectify things or so. Well, we'll see.

whipper
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Re: Carine McCandless is writing a memoir...

Postby whipper » Sun Dec 29, 2013 2:38 pm

just seems to me that he didn't want money, that is what he ran from among other things like his father being a pig.. and having a few families.. and his parents lying about it.. I think if he really loved his sister as she says.. he would have contacted her.. he did make contact with others he met on the road.. now they are all making money off of his death.. years and years later.. someone who commits suicide and then they make it out to be so great.. it sends the wrong message.. and the family is reaping the benefits.. what kind of society do we live in?
So the parents are no different then the sister.. whom he didn't make contact with.. so she can only speculate.. I say take him off the cross.. someone needs the damn wood.. he killed himself.. end of story..

marcym
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Re: Carine McCandless is writing a memoir...

Postby marcym » Sun May 11, 2014 1:04 am

I look forward to reading the new book. Thanks Carine for sharing with us your memories.

M.
Last edited by marcym on Tue Oct 28, 2014 3:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

SteveSalmon
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Re: Carine McCandless is writing a memoir...

Postby SteveSalmon » Thu Jul 24, 2014 11:46 pm

The link below will take you to what I believe is the first review of Carine's new book and memoir "The Wild Truth". It's available now for pre-order via Amazon in case you hadn't heard.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-06-232514-3

~Steve Salmon

aldenm
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Re: Carine McCandless is writing a memoir...

Postby aldenm » Sat Nov 01, 2014 6:45 am

Do not know to have read online, the price is high?
http://www.topdvdmarket.com
http://www.topdvdmarket.com/goods-1859-Disney.html

erikhalfacre
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Re: Carine McCandless is writing a memoir...

Postby erikhalfacre » Sat Nov 15, 2014 7:59 am

Carine's book was on the shelf at the Barnes and Noble here in Anchorage the day before it was scheduled to be released. I bought it, took it home, and spent the rest of the evening reading it.

From having talked to Carine on a couple of different camping trips, and heard her talk about her brother, I had gathered enough to assume that their father Walt was abusive, in a classic narcissistic personality disorder sort of way. I think Sean Penn did a decent job alluding to that without spelling it out specifically, Jon to a lesser degree in his book.

Despite all of that though, this book was shocking to me. It was a pretty rough read, not really enjoyable at all. Carine wrote the book in a compelling enough manner, and I was certainly driven to keep turning the page, but the subject matter was just really emotionally charged. Anyone who reads this book, especially the passages from Chris' letters, will have no trouble understanding why he would want to 'divorce' his parents and leave them to wonder where he might be and what he might be doing.

It wasn't about being hateful and seeking revenge, it was about hurting them enough to shock them into reassessing their behavior, and if the desired result was not achieved, at least he'd be rid of them. This is often the motivation of children of narcissists. They are desperate to feel the love of their self-absorbed parent(s) and sometimes choose to do things that seem mean and spiteful, in order to try and affect change. The thing to understand is that as extreme as it may appear, they've already tried talking it over, reasoning it out, and smaller forms of rebellion and they just want a real relationship with their parents, something that in all likelihood they will simply never be able to achieve at any meaningful level.

Not having known Chris, I, like most of the world, will never be able to say I truly understood what made Chris do what he did and how he did it, but Carine's book makes the picture a lot less fuzzy.
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marcym
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Re: Carine McCandless is writing a memoir...

Postby marcym » Tue Nov 18, 2014 4:46 pm

I truly hope that after this new book and many invitations Carine got to the tv shows, we'll know the truth about a man that touched so deeply our hearts.

Carine is trying to improve the image of her brother, since he wasn't the selfish guy, selfish till the death, as some say; but afterwards this, I wish Chris can finally R.I.P with a bit of silence and contemplation about his story, by whom want doing so or simply silence and respect from others.

Also I'm sorry but I really don't get what's the point to teach his story at school. The domestic violences are horrible, but unfortunately, are quite commune. it's good to talk about it , I'm only wondering why many scholastic institutes don't chose different and more recent subjects, I mean people still alive able to explain and to talk personally about their stories.

We know almost all about Chris...and his parents life...we really have the right to go so far indeed? I don't know...they made mistakes, but...who are we to judge them?

Afterward the truth, can we please leave a bit only in the private side, with the aim to respect Chris and his memory?
I mean it's good talking about domestic violence trying to figure it out, trying to find a solution, but I don't consider appropriate using for ever the personal and private story of a man died 22 years ago, because after 22 years those that wanted to learn something from him have had many opportunities.

Frankly, I have some doubts about why Chris never contacted Carine during his journey, so I'm not sure they were so close as she says.
Maybe the reality is that he didn't feel understood from her thus not really loved and for this reason he never contacted her.
It was not the same for others he met as Jane and Wayne, he contacted them many times; they accepted him as he was, really enjoyed spending time with him and he felt happy with them.
The story about how he didn't contacted her cause afraid to being reached, it's not credible, but anyway, whatever is the truth, it's remarkable her attempt to show all her love for Chris even now after more than 20 years, it's never too late. As a sister of a brother I really respect and appreciate this.
Naturally I have the idea that all the people that feel so close to Chris, have the hope, that her love is pure and true, and not a kind of commercial attempt to gain popularity and money as someone hazarded. I wanna trust her since I can't assume a different reality.

For what worth my opinion also the letter Chris wrote to her it's not much as a proof of his hate towards Billie and Walt: we are talking about a letter of a 22 years old guy, livid with his parents, he was aware of the limits of their relation and decided to quit after suffering too much...I think he undertook what was right for him in that moment but we never know how the situation would have been now.

I think he made his travel within the intent to bring happiness to his life, not to die.

R.I.P Chris.
Last edited by marcym on Wed Dec 03, 2014 4:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

GoNorth
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Re: Carine McCandless is writing a memoir...

Postby GoNorth » Tue Dec 02, 2014 8:31 pm

Ok, so I read her book and would like to share my thoughts here.

Let me start with 2 general things:
1. Serves them right, all those unnerving Krakauer bashers of the past few years, whether it be other journalists or all those guys claiming they had new theories about how Chris really died, but finally wrote mostly about what they think were the reasons why naughty Jon Krakauer deliberately omitted to write their “truth” in his book at the time. :roll: I really like the fact that he now wrote the foreword of Carine’s book and also got some nice mentioning in some chapters as well.
I mean, I never met that guy and certainly wouldn’t say his book is perfect, but I still think he did an awesome job back then, researching for years and trying hard to get as many pieces together as possible, in order to tell the story as truly as possible, within the boudaries of what he was allowed to publish then. And most importantly, without his work, none of these self-important new-theory-writers would have that kind of topic to show off with. :P

2. Serves them right, all the superficial audience (or readers) of ITW, who stupidly and sometimes even dispespectfully criticized Chris for having left his oh so loving family! For a person with a minimum of common sense, Krakauer’s book and the movie plus maybe some further publications on the internet should have been enough evidence that there was something fundamentally wrong in the McCandless family. But now with all the additional insights Carine gives us in her book, nobody will ever again expect to be taken seriously by stating that Chris’s leaving was a selfish act. Ok, I’ve seen that there are still some reviews of that kind in amazon, but I’m quite sure those users are either Billie and Walt themselves (or people they pay for it) or other really cruel parents.


Comments on the content in detail:

All in all, the things she wrote confirmed the impressions gained from prior publications and stuff on the internet: Walt and Billie still don’t have the guts to admit their failure as parents and try to mask their bad conscience with ridiculous lies, and that’s why Carine and her half-siblings have all decided to cut the contact.
Still: even though there had been quite a few allusions to Walt’s violence against Billie as well as her own personal spinelessness before, I really wouldn’t have expected that things had gone THAT far. By which I mean both Walt’s and Billie’s ways of behaving with … well, all of their family members. To me, all the details about the violence and their refusing to take resposibility for their actions, even years and decades later, is definitely what shocked and also disgusted me most in this book.
The letters from Chris are quite interesting to read, however the essential stuff like when he wrote her that he was going to “divorce” their parents had already been published in Krakauer’s book. I just wasn’t aware (or didn’t remember) that it had been so clear (in the letters to Carine) that Chris was really going to leave right after his college graduation.
Of course, we still don’t know why he left on his journey without really saying good-bye to Carine nor why he chose not to contact her at all in all those months and then years. That still doesn’t really fit her description of the loving and protecting older brother.

But maybe it does fit somehow, given the fact that he was raised by Walt and Billie.
What I mean is that, for both Chris and Carine, the way they grew up necessarily had to cause some kind of damage.
For Carine, it’s more plain to see: Getting married at age 18 to a guy who soon became violent, quite a classical result of growing up with abusive parents.
Then there’s the fact that over and over again she was ready to forgive the unforgivable to her parents. To a certain point, I think that’s ok, after all, everybody deserves and 2nd chance, and maybe even a third or forth… But after a while, she should have realized that they had crossed the line too far and too many times; so she should have ended this whole thing much much earlier! But again, this incapacity to set limits in order to preserve her own well-being is a typical reaction for an unloved child as well. For most probably the same reasons, she also waited so long to talk/write about the whole thing.
And after having read this whole story, I suspect that the way Carine seems to defend her brother failing to contact her in 2 years, as well as the fact that Chris actually didn’t contact her, also both have something to do with that “damage” they got from their parents’ “education style”. But please don’t get me wrong, I truly believe that Chris and Carine really loved each other as much as siblings can, and that they seriously cared for each other and all that, I really do NOT question that for a second. But I do believe that with what they’ve been through with their parents, both of them had to develop some kind of interpersonal dysfunction (or whatever they call it ;) ) that somehow affected their ability to take responsibility under certain circumstances.
I even dare to go as far as to suspect that the toxic childhood home was not only the reason why Chris left his family, but also the reason why he failed to survive in the end!

However, both Chris and Carine had/have something else, something that kept them from becoming as disgusting as their parents. What’s that and where did they get it from? We still know far too little about all they experienced in their childhood and youth, but I imagine their half-siblings had something to do with it. Those kids who had the same horrible father, but – unlike Chris and Carine – a loving mother, who finally had the strength to do what’s best for herself and her children.

So, well, I think that’s it for now.
I’m curious about your thoughts.


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