Tiny Beautiful Things
Read Tiny Beautiful Things Online
Authors: Cheryl Strayed
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, we’re reading the columns with boxes of tissue and raised fists of solidarity, shaking our heads with awe and amusement.”
—Sarah Hepola,
Salon
“Sugar doesn’t coddle her readers—she 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 doesn’t 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
“Sugar’s columns are easily the most beautiful thing I’ve 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 West’s
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
[email protected]
.
ALSO BY CHERYL STRAYED
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Torch
A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, JULY 2012
Copyright
©
2012 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 life—Miscellanea. I. Title.
BJ1589.S84 2012
070.4′44—dc23
2012007154
Cover design by John Gall
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.