Strayed - Tiny beautiful things : advice on love and life from Dear Sugar

Praise for DEAR SUGAR

These pieces are nothing short of dynamite, the kind of remarkable, revelatory storytelling that makes young people want to become writers in the first place. Over here at the Salon offices, were reading the columns with boxes of tissue and raised fists of solidarity, shaking our heads with awe and amusement.

Sarah Hepola, Salon

Sugar doesnt coddle her readersshe believes them, and hears the stories inside the story they think they want to tell. She manages astonishing levels of empathy without dissolving into sentiment, and sees problems before the reader can. Sugar doesnt promise to make anyone feel good, only that she understands a question well enough to answer it.

Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker critic

Powerful and soulful, Tiny Beautiful Things is destined to become a classic of the form, the sort of book readers will carry around in purses and backpacks during difficult times as a token or talisman because of the radiant wisdom and depth within.

Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Sugar is turning the advice column on its head.

Jessica Francis Kane, author of The Report

Sugars columns are easily the most beautiful thing Ive read all year. They should be taught in schools and put on little slips of paper and dropped from airplanes, for all to read.

Meakin Armstrong, Guernica editor

Dear Sugar will save your soul. I belong to the Church of Sugar.

Samantha Dunn, author of Failing Paris

Charming, idiosyncratic, luminous, profane. [Sugar] is remaking a genre that has existed, in more or less the same form, since well before Nathanael Wests Miss Lonelyhearts first put a face on the figure in 1933. Her version of tough love ranges from hip-older-sister-loving to governess-stern. Sugar shines out amid the sea of fakeness.

Ruth Franklin, The New Republic

Cheryl Strayed
TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS

Cheryl Strayed is the author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail and the novel Torch. Her stories and essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Allure, The Rumpus, The Missouri Review, The Sun, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Cheryl Strayed is available for select readings and lectures. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact the Random House Speakers Bureau at .

ALSO BY CHERYL STRAYED

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Torch

A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, JULY 2012

Copyright2012 by Cheryl Strayed

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Much of the material in this work was originally published in the Dear Sugar column on TheRumpus.net.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Strayed, Cheryl, 1968
Tiny beautiful things : advice on love and life from Dear Sugar / Cheryl Strayed.
p. cm. (A Vintage Books original)
eISBN: 978-0-307-94932-5
1. Conduct of lifeMiscellanea. I. Title.
BJ1589.S84 2012
070.444dc23
2012007154

Cover design by John Gall

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

For Stephen Elliott and Isaac Fitzgerald

And for all the people who wrote to me

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 Id received as Sugar.

The column that launched Sugar as a phenomenon was written in response to what would have been, for anyone else, a throwaway letter. Dear Sugar, wrote a presumably young man. WTF, WTF, WTF? Im asking this question as it applies to everything every day. Cheryls reply began as follows:

Dear WTF,

My fathers father made me jack him off when I was three and four and five. I wasnt any good at it. My hands were too small and I couldnt get the rhythm right and I didnt understand what I was doing. I only knew I didnt 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.