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Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Soon to be a Hulu Original series • The internationally acclaimed author of Wild collects the best of The Rumpus's Dear Sugar advice columns plus never-before-published pieces. Rich with humor and insight-and absolute honesty-this "wise and compassionate" (New York Times Book Review) book is a balm for everything life throws our way.
Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you; you lose a family member; you can't pay the bills-and it can be great: you've had the hottest sex of your life; you get that plum job; you muster the courage to write your novel. Sugar-the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus, now revealed as Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestselling memoir Wild-is the person thousands turn to for advice.
Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you; you lose a family member; you can't pay the bills-and it can be great: you've had the hottest sex of your life; you get that plum job; you muster the courage to write your novel. Sugar-the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus, now revealed as Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestselling memoir Wild-is the person thousands turn to for advice.
Editorial Reviews
"Penning an advice column for the literary website The Rumpus, [Strayed] worked anonymously, using the pen name Sugar, replying to letters from readings suffering everything from loveless marriages to abusive, drug-addicted brothers to disfiguring illnesses. The result: intimate, in-depth essays that not only took the letter writer's life into account but also Strayed's. Collected in a book, they make for riveting, emotionally charged reading (translation: be prepared to bawl) that leaves you significantly wiser for the experience. . . . Moving. . . . compassionate." -Leigh Newman, Oprah.com
"A fascinating blend of memoir and self-help. Strayed is an eloquent storyteller, and her clear-eyed prose offers a bracing empathy absent from most self-help blather." -Nora Krug, The Washington Post
"Strayed's worldview-her empathy, her nonjudgment, her belief in the fundamental logic of people's emotions and experiences despite occasional evidence to the contrary-begins to seep into readers' consciousness in such a way that they can apply her generosity of spirit to their own and, for a few hours at least, become better people. . . . The book's disclosures-on the part of both the writer and her correspondents-is ultimately courageous and engaging stuff." -Anna Holmes, New York Times Book Review
"Wise and compassionate." -Gregory Cowles, New York Times Book Review "Inside the List"
"It seems inadequate to call ‘Dear Sugar' an advice column, because it exists in a category all its own . . . Part memoir, part essay collection, the aptly titled Tiny Beautiful Things gathers together stunningly written pieces on everything from sex to love to the agonies of bereavement. Strayed offers insights as exquisitely phrased as they are powerful, confronting some of the biggest and most painful of life's questions. . . . . In her responses, Strayed shines a torch of insight and comfort into the darkness of these people's lives, cutting to the heart of what it means to love, to grieve and to suffer." -Ilana Teitelbaum, Shelf Awareness
"What makes a great advice columnist? . . . Strayed has proved during her tenure at the website the Rumpus, where she has helmed the Dear Sugar column since 2010, that the only requirement is that you give great advice-tender, frank, uplifting and unrelenting. Strayed's columns, now collected as Tiny Beautiful Things, advise people o...
"A fascinating blend of memoir and self-help. Strayed is an eloquent storyteller, and her clear-eyed prose offers a bracing empathy absent from most self-help blather." -Nora Krug, The Washington Post
"Strayed's worldview-her empathy, her nonjudgment, her belief in the fundamental logic of people's emotions and experiences despite occasional evidence to the contrary-begins to seep into readers' consciousness in such a way that they can apply her generosity of spirit to their own and, for a few hours at least, become better people. . . . The book's disclosures-on the part of both the writer and her correspondents-is ultimately courageous and engaging stuff." -Anna Holmes, New York Times Book Review
"Wise and compassionate." -Gregory Cowles, New York Times Book Review "Inside the List"
"It seems inadequate to call ‘Dear Sugar' an advice column, because it exists in a category all its own . . . Part memoir, part essay collection, the aptly titled Tiny Beautiful Things gathers together stunningly written pieces on everything from sex to love to the agonies of bereavement. Strayed offers insights as exquisitely phrased as they are powerful, confronting some of the biggest and most painful of life's questions. . . . . In her responses, Strayed shines a torch of insight and comfort into the darkness of these people's lives, cutting to the heart of what it means to love, to grieve and to suffer." -Ilana Teitelbaum, Shelf Awareness
"What makes a great advice columnist? . . . Strayed has proved during her tenure at the website the Rumpus, where she has helmed the Dear Sugar column since 2010, that the only requirement is that you give great advice-tender, frank, uplifting and unrelenting. Strayed's columns, now collected as Tiny Beautiful Things, advise people o...
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
From the INTRODUCTION by Steve Almond
I Was Sugar Once: Lessons in Radical Empathy
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 online community around literature, called The Rumpus. Being a writer himself, and therefore impoverished, Stephen prevailed upon 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 desperate for 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, when I 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 to take over as Sugar.
It was an insane request. Like me, Cheryl had two small kids at home, a mountain of debt, and no regular academic gig. The last thing she needed was an online advice column for which she would be paid nothing. Of course, I did have an ace in the hole: Cheryl had written the one and only fan letter I'd received as Sugar.
***
The column that launched Sugar as a phenomenon was writ- ten in response to what would have been, for anyone else, a throwaway letter. Dear Sugar, wrote a presumably young man. WTF, WTF, WTF? I'm asking this question as it applies to everything every day. Cheryl's reply began as follows:
Dear WTF,
My father's father made me jack him off when I was three and four and five. I wasn't any good at it. My hands were too small and I couldn't get the rhythm right and I didn't understand what I was doing. I only knew I didn't want to do it. Knew that it made me feel miserable and anxious in a way so sickeningly particular that I can feel that same particular sickness rising this very minute in my throat.
It was an absolutely unprecedented moment. Advice columnists, after all, adhere to an unspoken code: focus on the letter writer, dispense the necessary bromides, make it all seem bearable. Disclosing your own sexual assault is not part of the code.
But Cheryl wasn't just trying to shock some callow kid into greater compassion. She was announcing the nature of her mission as Sugar. Inexplicable sorrows await all of us. That was her essential point. Life isn't some narcissistic game you play online. It all matters-every sin, every regret, every affliction. As proof, she offered an account of her own struggle to reckon with a cruelty she'd absorbed before she was old enough even to understand it. Ask better questions, sweet pea, she concluded, with great gentleness. The fuck is your life. Answer it.
Like a lot of folks, I read the piece with tears in my eyes- which is how one reads Sugar. This wasn't some pro forma kibitzer, sifting through a stack of modern anxieties. She was a real human being laying herself bare, fearlessly, that we might come to understand the nature of our own predicaments.
***
I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives-those fountains of inconvenient feeling-and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market.
We're...
