Tiny Beautiful Things

A Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick soon to be a major series on Disney+

Cheryl Strayed

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781782390701
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Self Improvement

Rich with humour, insight, compassion - and absolute honesty - Tiny Beautiful Things is a balm for everything life throws our way, administered by the author of the New York Times -bestselling memoir, Wild Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you, you lose a family member, you can't pay the bills. But it can be pretty great, too: you've had the hottest sex of your life, you get that plum job, you muster the courage to write your novel. Everyday across the world, people go through the full and glorious gamut of life - but sometimes, a little advice is needed. For several years, thousands turned to Cheryl Strayed, a then-anonymous internet Agony Aunt. But unlike most Agony Aunts, this one's advice was spun from genuine compassion and informed by a wealth of personal experience - experience that was sometimes tragic and sometimes tender, often hilarious and often heartbreaking. Having successfully battled her own demons while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed sat down to answer the letters of the frightened, the anxious, the confused; and with each gem-like correspondence - of which the best are collected in this volume - she proved to be the perfect guide for those who had got a little lost in life.

CONTENTS

Introduction by Steve Almond

Part I

IT WAS ALWAYS ONLY US

Like an Iron Bell

How You Get Unstuck

That Ecstatic Parade

A Motorcycle with No One on It

The Reckoning

There’s a Bundle on Your Head

Write Like a Motherfucker

A New, More Fractured Light

Dudes in the Woods

Icky Thoughts Turn Me On

Reach

Part II

WHATEVER MYSTERIOUS STARLIGHT THAT GUIDED YOU THIS FAR

The Baby Bird

Go! Go! Go!

The Black Arc of It

Hell Is Other People’s Boyfriends

Thwack, Thwack, Thwack

The Woman Hanging on the End of the Line

No Mystery About Sperm

The Mad Sex Confessor

The Future Has an Ancient Heart

Faux Friendship Footsie

The Human Scale

Part III

CARRY THE WATER YOURSELF

Beauty and the Beast

I Chose van Gogh

The Other Side of the Pool

The Truth That Lives There

Too Much Paint

Tiny Revolutions

Not Enough

No Is Golden

Romantic Love Is Not a Competitive Sport

A Big Life

The Known Unknowns

On Your Island

Part IV

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE BROKEN FOR ME

The Magic of Wanting to Be

A Glorious Something Else

A Tunnel That Wakes You

How the Real Work Is Done

The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us

Your Invisible Inner Terrible Someone

Waiting by the Phone

We Are All Savages Inside

The Lusty Broad

The Bad Things You Did

Bend

The Obliterated Place

Part V

PUT IT IN A BOX AND WAIT

A Bit of Sully in Your Sweet

We Are Here to Build the House

The Empty Bowl

Transcend

A Shimmering Slice of Your Mysterious Destiny

The Ordinary Miraculous

We Call This a Clusterfuck

Are You My Mother?

Ten Angry Boys

Tiny Beautiful Things

Acknowledgments

Note on the Author

INTRODUCTION

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 written 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 hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we’re falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won’t stick.

And this, I think, is why Sugar has become so important to so many people. Because she’s offering something almost unheard of in our culture: radical empathy. People come to her in real pain and she ministers to them, by telling stories about her own life, the particular ways in which she’s felt thwarted and lost, and how she got found again. She is able to transmute the raw material of the self-help aisle into genuine literature.

I think here of the response she offered a man wrecked by his son’s death, who asked her how he might become human again. “The strange and painful truth is that I’m a better person because I lost my mom young,” she wrote. “When you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place.”

In this sense, Tiny Beautiful Things can be read as a kind of ad hoc memoir. But it’s a memoir with an agenda. With great patience, and eloquence, she assures her readers that within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue.

* * *

It is striking that Sugar was born on the Internet, that shadow world to which people apply with a need to escape from their true selves, to remake their identities on the cheap, to shine their buttons in public. The Internet can be many things, of course. Too often it’s a cesspool of distraction, a place where we indulge in the modern sport of snark and schadenfreude, building the case for our own bigotries, where we mock and thereby dismiss the suffering of others.

But the lurking dream of all us online lurkers is that we might someday confess to our own suffering, that we might find someone who will listen to us, who will not turn away in the face of our ugliest revelations. That someone is Sugar.

There’s nothing you can tell Sugar that doesn’t strike her as beautiful and human. Which is why men and women write to her about intimacies they can’t share with anyone else, unspeakable urges, insoluble grief. She understands that attention is the first and final act of love, and that the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.

With each of her pieces—I hesitate to use the word “columns,” which seems to cheapen what she does—she performs the same miraculous act: she absorbs our stories. She lets them inhabit her, and thinks about the stories they evoke from her own life. She also recognizes that there’s another, truer story beneath the one we generally offer the world, the stuff we can’t or won’t see, the evasions and delusions, the places where we’re simply stuck. Sugar may be tender, but she doesn’t sugarcoat. In this sense, she offers what we wish every mother would: enough compassion to make us feel safe within our broken need, and enough wisdom to hold on to hope.

I ask you, brave people: who else is doing this work today? Not the fame merchants of Hollywood, with their explosions and shiny tits, not the for -profit demagogues of the Fourth Estate, and not the politicians who murder morals on behalf of the corporate sponsors and call it policy.

Sugar does this work. It’s what makes her an artist.

* * *

Cheryl Strayed was an artist long before she became Sugar. Those of you fortunate enough to have read Cheryl’s novel, Torch, or her memoir, Wild, already know this.

It’s been tricky for Cheryl to negotiate the business of leading two lives: one as an anonymous columnist with a huge cult following, and the other as writer and mother and wife trying to make ends meet. Critics and Internet snipes will have a good time fulminating on this Cheryl/Sugar dichotomy. But the name on the byline is never what matters to readers. What matters to them are the words on the page.

Tiny Beautiful Things will endure as a piece of literary art, as will Cheryl’s other books, because they do the essential work of literary art: they make us more human than we were before. We need books, and Cheryl’s books in particular, because we are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn’t embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and that all we have to offer, in the end, is love.

Radical empathy isn’t the fashion of the day. Late-model capitalism works overtime to keep us focused on the product, not the people. That’s why we need Sugar so badly right now. You’ll see what I mean when you turn the page.

Run toward the darkness, sweet peas, and shine.

—Steve Almond

PART ONE

IT WAS ALWAYS ONLY US

What is this book?

It’s a selection of Dear Sugar columns. Many were originally published on TheRumpus.net. Others appear here for the first time. The letters in this book were emailed to Sugar via an anonymous form on The Rumpus or mailed directly to Sugar’s email address. Most people who sent me letters didn’t know I was Cheryl Strayed and likewise most of the letter writers were entirely anonymous to me. This book is a collection of intimate exchanges between strangers.

Did you change the letters before publishing them?

In some cases I lightly edited the letters for length and/or clarity, but most appear exactly as they were written by people who felt moved to write to me.

What sorts of letters do you answer?

All sorts. Some are about romance and love, others are about grief and loss, and others still about money or family troubles. My criteria for selecting letters to answer in the Dear Sugar column are highly subjective: I’ll answer anything, so long as it interests or challenges or touches me.

What sort of advice do you give?

The best I can think of.

LIKE AN IRON BELL

Dear Sugar,

My twenty-year marriage fell apart. Whose fault? Mine? My wife’s? Society’s? I don’t know. We were too immature to get married back in the eighties, and we both worked hard to avoid dealing with the unhappiness that was hanging over us.

But that’s in the past. I’ve had a few relationships in the three years since the split. One casual, one serious, and one current. There was no issue with the casual one: I was up-front about not wanting to settle down so soon. The second one started out casual, and I actually broke it off when she got serious, but I couldn’t stay away and promised to consider long-term plans with her. I also told her I loved her after a year of avoiding that word, the definition of which I don’t really understand. I balked when it came time to piss or get off the pot and I lost both a lover and a friend in her.

Now I’ve again met a woman with whom I click very nicely. We have been dating and being intimate for about four months. She’s going through a bitter divorce and wasn’t looking for a commitment. That sounded perfect, but in reality neither of us was interested in dating more than one person, so here we are in an exclusive relationship.

She sounds like she’s falling in love with me, though she won’t say the word. I am avoiding that word as well, but clearly we’re both thinking it. I’m afraid of saying it out loud, as my experience shows that word “love” comes loaded with promises and commitments that are highly fragile and easily broken.

My question to you is, when is it right to take that big step and say I love you? And what is this “love” thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition (2022)
• Introduction by Steve Almond
• Part I It was always only us
• Part II Whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far
• Part III Carry the water yourself
• Part IV You don’t have to be broken for me
• Part V Put it in a box and wait
• Part VI We are the solid