Lyrical Self-Help: The Compassion of Sugar

The first Dear Sugar column I read was “How You Get Unstuck,” in which Sugar consoles a woman devastated by a miscarriage. Those who expect her to move on gracefully from the trauma, Sugar tells her, “live on Planet Earth. You live on Planet My Baby Died.” I was 18 and in my senior year of high school and I must have read the column three times in fewer days. Overnight I joined the huge following devoted to this then-anonymous advice columnist redefining the form.

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar collects more than 50 columns by Sugar, aka novelist/memoirist Cheryl Strayed. It includes a well-curated selection of the pieces originally published on The Rumpus and a handful of columns, some very brief, not previously published. Steve Almond, who originally had the Sugar gig, contributes a tender, exultant foreword, and micro interviews with Strayed introduce each of the book’s five themed sections.

These columns are unusual because many are as much about the adviser as the advisee. They’re part advice, part personal essay. But it is not simply Strayed’s inclusion of her own stories that makes her singular in her field. Rather, it’s the delicate way she interweaves these stories with the pieces. She makes it clear not only that advice and anecdote are not discrete components of each column, but also that all advice bears one’s own stories in it. When we ask someone, stranger or friend, “What are my options? What should I do?”, implicit in the question is another: “What has your life taught you about living that might help you advise me?” Our lives inform our choices and thus our counsel. By writing about herself, Strayed imbues her advice with a rare transparency, authenticity, and credibility.

Strayed’s openness also fosters a potent intimacy, though a strange one: an intimacy in one sense shared between two strangers (most of the letter writers are, like Sugar was, pseudonymous) but in fact shared with anyone with Internet access—and now anyone with this book. That Strayed has now gone public alters but does not diminish this complex relationship.

So Strayed’s take on the form is inventive. But her patience and tenderness distinguish her, too. She is direct and sometimes severe, but she never condemns. Her empathy is infectious, and it’s needed. Many if not all of us are gossips, hungering for others’ stories and secrets. One of the advice column’s appeals is the promise of nosing into someone else’s business, often to gawk and mock and judge. Rather than nourish that prurient want, Strayed’s columns transform it. Removed leering becomes involved listening. Judgment gives way to compassion.

Tiny Beautiful Things is a collection of these columns and it is more than that. It has an integrity all its own. Though organized thematically rather than chronologically, the book feels like an epistolary memoir. It is a fractured look at Strayed’s life as filtered through others’ lives, and in that sense it becomes a kind of collaborative memoir, too. In terms of the advice itself, though Strayed never exactly repeats herself, the more you read the columns, the more you can anticipate what she’ll advise. Ethical principles emerge as themes reoccur: Strayed emphasizes honesty with oneself and others, gratitude, boundary setting, humility, and unreserved empathy. Nothing revolutionary, but plenty that is vital.

Tiny Beautiful Things ends up being something far less systematic or rigorous than an ethical treatise, but far more lyrical than a typical self-help book. It is practical but also meditative, a salve and a call to self-examination, an elegant ode to the troubles we face and our luck at not having to face them alone.