Tiny Beautiful Things

Tiny Beautiful Things:Advice on love and life from Dear Sugar

By Cheryl Strayed

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.

Tiny Beautiful Things brings the best of Dear Sugar together in one place and includes never-before-published columns and a new introduction by Steve Almond.  Rich with humor, insight, compassion - and absolute honesty - this book is a balm for everything life throws our way.

Cheryl Strayed is a heck of a memorialist, but I can only say that if I had actually written in to her for advice, I would definitely have been sitting there with her answer, crumpling the paper, screaming, "Get to the point!" She takes each letter and starts off basically with a "let me tell you about a seemingly (and in fact sometimes actually) unrelated event that happened to me, and after several pages of that I will analogize it to your problem".  I was so struck by this method, I'll attempt to recreate it for this review:

I read, regularly, certain advice columns.  This has not always been the same column, as it depends on those that I can most easily access, but for the last few years, it has included Dear Prudence, which used to be written by various other people, and then was written by Emily Yoffe, and then, most recently and dramatically, it was taken over by Daniel Mallory Ortberg (formerly Mallory Ortberg of The Toast).  Words cannot express how inadequate the advice given at the beginning of Ortberg's reign was.  It was so uniformly awful that there the site moderators had to tell people (repeatedly!  They left this as a message at the top of comments for weeks!) not to make derogatory comments about Ortberg's skills as an advice columnist and ask for Yoffe to come back.  It truly was a rocky road.  (Note that Dear Prudence's overlords at Slate seem to think "terrible advice column" is a successful business strategy,  as they are employing it once again with a sex column answered by two people, who, in one now infamous example, told an older heterosexual man who was having trouble connecting with his wife to "try a glory hole".  And yes, that is how "try a glory hole!" has become shorthand acknowledgement of shitty advice on one small corner of the internet.  I think broadly speaking though, that's going to be shitty advice 99.9% of the time, so feel free to expand its reach.)

As the wheel turns, gradually Ortberg became better at the job, being less sarcastic, and has mostly stopped uniformly recommending that people having communication problems with their significant others simply break up with them (I suppose as an alternative to having a difficult conversation, but I don't think we should encourage breaking up, since it's already such a tempting way out).  He's still hot on lengthy speeches for people to give, although we're hoping to wean him off those eventually too.  When he first started he was short and snappy and kinda fun, albeit somewhat too snappy in some cases.  I think the backlash from the appearance of flippancy has made him backpedal into the quagmire of five minute explanations of why you need space from your friend, when really, all you have to (and in most cases, should) say is: "I need some space."

All of this is to say that there's definitely some columnists who set the bar low, and give you confidence that you could easily do this job yourself.  Strayed (and Dear Sugar) is not one of them.  She is empathetic, sympathetic, warm, funny, and insightful.  Now, you do have to wade through a ten year history of Strayed's life to get there, but there is a great place to be. 

I did think it was kind of hilarious early on when she does a list of FAQs (sidebar: why do we say FAQs? It's always plural. Never has anyone typed FAQ and meant "Frequently Asked Question".  And yet, I feel compelled to make it clear this is a plural situation going on here. Society's mores are killing creativity!) and one of the questions is: "Are the letters you publish really sent in by anonymous people? Most are so well written that it seems you or The Rumpus writers must be creating them." Her answer (basically, she has so many that she can choose the most well written, and yes, aren't they all lovely) is a delightful eliding over the fact that the letters all kind of sound the same, too.  "I'm not smart, but I know what love is" and "please be honest, blunt, and give me a new perspective on my multifaceted problem" and "how do I reconnect with him in a genuine way?"

I have to say that it seemed unlikely to me, too, that all these people writing in were so erudite and clear in their desperation, but it doesn't detract from my enjoyment of her answers.  Her responses are such that I found myself on the edge of tears more than once. It's not only that she gives good advice - though she does, frequently telling them not what to do, but how to decide it - but that she allows the reader to view their problems with the same compassion and generosity of spirit that Strayed sees them. What infinite patience Strayed has for the person who overheard their friends talking about them behind their back, for the woman who likes kinky sex, for the person whose father is telling them things they don't want to hear, for the high schooler whose friends are messy. 

Or for the person who is afraid to say the word love:

"We're all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it's dinnertime."




Footnote: I don't mean to be unduly harsh on Ortberg - he really was just awful when he started, but he's gotten a lot better since!  There's very few columns now where he strikes out more than once.

10: A Book With "Pop" "Sugar" Or "Challenge" In The Title