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Tiny Beautiful Things (10th Anniversary Edition): Advice from Dear Sugar
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK • An anniversary edition of the bestselling collection of "Dear Sugar" advice columns written by the author of #1 bestseller Wild-featuring a new preface and six additional columns. • NOW A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES
For more than a decade, thousands of people have sought advice from Dear Sugar-the pseudonym of bestselling author Cheryl Strayed-first through her online column at The Rumpus, later through her hit podcast, Dear Sugars, and now through her popular Substack newsletter. Tiny Beautiful Things collects the best of Dear Sugar in one volume, bringing her wisdom to many more readers. This tenth-anniversary edition features six new columns and a new preface by Strayed. Rich with humor, insight, compassion-and absolute honesty-this book is a balm for everything life throws our way.
For more than a decade, thousands of people have sought advice from Dear Sugar-the pseudonym of bestselling author Cheryl Strayed-first through her online column at The Rumpus, later through her hit podcast, Dear Sugars, and now through her popular Substack newsletter. Tiny Beautiful Things collects the best of Dear Sugar in one volume, bringing her wisdom to many more readers. This tenth-anniversary edition features six new columns and a new preface by Strayed. Rich with humor, insight, compassion-and absolute honesty-this book is a balm for everything life throws our way.
Editorial Reviews
"Revolutionary. . . . In Strayed's hands, the advice column [is] a radical therapeutic experience. . . . like downing a cup of ayahuasca. . . Strayed would transform your existential problem into swooning, bespoke essays that exposed as much of the advice-giver as they did of the petitioner. . . . [She] has steadily opened up a new vocabulary for how we express ourselves, personally and politically." -The New Yorker
"Charming, idiosyncratic, luminous, profane. . . . Sugar is the ultimate advice columnist for the internet age. . . . She shines out amid the sea of fakeness." -The New Republic
"Destined to become a classic of the form." -Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
"These pieces are nothing short of dynamite." -Salon
"Charming, idiosyncratic, luminous, profane. . . . Sugar is the ultimate advice columnist for the internet age. . . . She shines out amid the sea of fakeness." -The New Republic
"Destined to become a classic of the form." -Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
"These pieces are nothing short of dynamite." -Salon
Readers Top Reviews
Brittany KBrittan
Damaged upon receiving it. Returning. Also, someone else’s gift note was included. Not sure who that person is but feel bad they didn’t get their book. This review isn’t based on on the content of the book just the actual quality received
Frank GuilfoyBrit
I appreciated how honest Cheryl was in her advice to all the people who took the time to write to her with their concerns and admissions.
Michael BabelFran
I don't want to write a review of the book because everyone has their own taste. But if you're looking for this kind of thing, this so far exceeds expectation. It's prose is potent, there is a whimsy that carries you through so easefully you hardly even notice the download of wisdom. If there's someone in your life who's struggling, needs inspiration, or is just ready for their next steps, this is a heartful, lovely journey.
Douglas WickardMi
Her words are golden, her writing delicious, her delivery… well… terrific. But… I felt it was a long climb. A good 4 stars.
Gary Wayne talley
Wild was such an emotional and heart rending book that I could feel her pain and I loved the movie with Reese Witherspoon.in tiny beautiful things she gave witty and tough love advice and she does not have a degree in psychology or social work. I do not know how she acquired all of this wisdom. In this book you can also feel people’s pain due to the fact she is a remarkable writer.I lost my mother in 2012.
Short Excerpt Teaser
PREFACE TO THE VINTAGE BOOKS
TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION (2022)
I've long believed literature's greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone. Across generations, cultures, classes, races, genders, and every other divide, stories and sentences
can make us think, Oh yes, me too. That is precisely how it feels to love and lose and triumph and try again. The only thing I ever hope to do as a writer is to make people feel less alone, to make them feel more human, to make them feel what I have felt so many times as a reader: stories have the power to save us by illuminating the most profoundly beautiful and terrible things about our existence.
That I've had the opportunity to do so very directly in my work as Dear Sugar was a lucky surprise. When I took on the unpaid gig of writing the column anonymously for The Rumpus in early 2010, I'd recently completed the first draft of my second book, Wild. I said yes to writing the
Dear Sugar column because I thought it would be fun. It didn't take long to see I'd been wrong. It was fun, but also so much more than that. This work that began as a lark quickly took on real meaning. It became something I gave everything to.
And, eventually, it also became a book-which, over this past decade, has inspired a podcast, a play, and a television show, as well as this expanded tenth-anniversary edition that includes six new columns.
All along the way I've never forgotten that none of it would've been possible without all the people who wrote to me. In an age when there is much discussion about the disconnection that comes from the Internet, the pandemic, the fallout of too much of life lived on screens, Dear Sugar
has always been, quite simply, about one person writing a letter to another. In pain and courage and confusion and clarity. In love and fear and faith. Dear Sugar has always been about connecting. It has always been about believing that when we dare to tell the truth about who we are and what we want and how exactly we're afraid or sad or lost or uncertain that transformation is possible, that light can be found, that courage and compassion can be mustered. To be part of that has been among the greatest privileges of my life.
Cheryl Strayed
INTRODUCTION: I Was Sugar Once: Lessons in Radical Empathy
by Steve Almond
Long ago, before there was a Sugar, there was Stephen Elliott. He had this idea for a website, which sounds pretty awful, I admit, except that his idea was really to build an onlinecommunity around literature, called The Rumpus. Being a writer himself, and therefore impoverished, Stephen prevailedupon his likewise impoverished writer friends to help.
And we, his friends, all said yes, because we love Stephen and because (if I may speak for the group) we were all desperatefor a noble-seeming distraction. My contribution was an advice column, which I suggested we call Dear Sugar Butt, after the endearment Stephen and I had taken to using in our email correspondence. I will not belabor the goofy homoeroticism that would lead to such an endearment. It will be enough to note that Dear Sugar Butt was shortened, mercifully, to Dear Sugar. Handing yourself a job as an advice columnist is a pretty arrogant thing to do, which is par for my particular course.But I justified it by supposing that I could create a different sort of advice column, both irreverent and brutally honest.The design flaw was that I conceived of Sugar as a persona, a woman with a troubled past and a slightly reckless tongue. And while there were moments when she felt real to me, whenI could feel myself locking into the pain of my correspondents, more often I faked it, making do with wit where my heart failed me. After a year of dashing off columns, I quit.
And that might have been the end of Sugar had I not, around this time, come across a nonfiction piece by Cheryl Strayed. I knew Cheryl as the author of a gorgeous and wrenching novel called Torch. But reading this essay, a searing recollection of infidelity and mourning, filled me with a tingling hunch. I wrote to ask if she wanted t...
TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION (2022)
I've long believed literature's greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone. Across generations, cultures, classes, races, genders, and every other divide, stories and sentences
can make us think, Oh yes, me too. That is precisely how it feels to love and lose and triumph and try again. The only thing I ever hope to do as a writer is to make people feel less alone, to make them feel more human, to make them feel what I have felt so many times as a reader: stories have the power to save us by illuminating the most profoundly beautiful and terrible things about our existence.
That I've had the opportunity to do so very directly in my work as Dear Sugar was a lucky surprise. When I took on the unpaid gig of writing the column anonymously for The Rumpus in early 2010, I'd recently completed the first draft of my second book, Wild. I said yes to writing the
Dear Sugar column because I thought it would be fun. It didn't take long to see I'd been wrong. It was fun, but also so much more than that. This work that began as a lark quickly took on real meaning. It became something I gave everything to.
And, eventually, it also became a book-which, over this past decade, has inspired a podcast, a play, and a television show, as well as this expanded tenth-anniversary edition that includes six new columns.
All along the way I've never forgotten that none of it would've been possible without all the people who wrote to me. In an age when there is much discussion about the disconnection that comes from the Internet, the pandemic, the fallout of too much of life lived on screens, Dear Sugar
has always been, quite simply, about one person writing a letter to another. In pain and courage and confusion and clarity. In love and fear and faith. Dear Sugar has always been about connecting. It has always been about believing that when we dare to tell the truth about who we are and what we want and how exactly we're afraid or sad or lost or uncertain that transformation is possible, that light can be found, that courage and compassion can be mustered. To be part of that has been among the greatest privileges of my life.
Cheryl Strayed
INTRODUCTION: I Was Sugar Once: Lessons in Radical Empathy
by Steve Almond
Long ago, before there was a Sugar, there was Stephen Elliott. He had this idea for a website, which sounds pretty awful, I admit, except that his idea was really to build an onlinecommunity around literature, called The Rumpus. Being a writer himself, and therefore impoverished, Stephen prevailedupon his likewise impoverished writer friends to help.
And we, his friends, all said yes, because we love Stephen and because (if I may speak for the group) we were all desperatefor a noble-seeming distraction. My contribution was an advice column, which I suggested we call Dear Sugar Butt, after the endearment Stephen and I had taken to using in our email correspondence. I will not belabor the goofy homoeroticism that would lead to such an endearment. It will be enough to note that Dear Sugar Butt was shortened, mercifully, to Dear Sugar. Handing yourself a job as an advice columnist is a pretty arrogant thing to do, which is par for my particular course.But I justified it by supposing that I could create a different sort of advice column, both irreverent and brutally honest.The design flaw was that I conceived of Sugar as a persona, a woman with a troubled past and a slightly reckless tongue. And while there were moments when she felt real to me, whenI could feel myself locking into the pain of my correspondents, more often I faked it, making do with wit where my heart failed me. After a year of dashing off columns, I quit.
And that might have been the end of Sugar had I not, around this time, come across a nonfiction piece by Cheryl Strayed. I knew Cheryl as the author of a gorgeous and wrenching novel called Torch. But reading this essay, a searing recollection of infidelity and mourning, filled me with a tingling hunch. I wrote to ask if she wanted t...
