She also lays bare the impossibility of controlling what isn’t ours to control. Sugar forces us to swallow sometimes painful realizations about what we want, who we are, and what we therefore must do - or, if not that, the choices we must make. Do you hear that?” Or, in another letter: “The sad but strong and true answer is the one you already told yourself.”
“ Every time I think about him touching me I want to cry, you say. You need me only to show you to yourself,” Strayed writes. “You don’t need me to tell you whether you should accept this offer. One young woman, about to lose her job, asks Sugar whether she should take a prostitution gig in order to pay the bills. Often, she quotes letters back at her advisees, showing them what they’ve already told her. As Sugar puts it, “This is where we must dig.” The innards of the innards: that’s where she starts.
Strayed finds the worm buried at the bottom of a pile of dirt, pulls it out like a thread, and slices it open. It’s the former that yield the most interesting and thoughtful responses. “I could put most of the letters I receive into two piles: those from people who are afraid to do what they know in their hearts they need to do, and those from people who have genuinely lost their way,” Strayed writes in one letter. It’s the question or lack that drives your existence. But it’s charged with an undercurrent: this isn’t, in fact, your name.
It’s the affection of a mother, or a lover, saying your name over and over again. Most people who write in use an alias - Stuck, Mourning and Raging, Wanting - which Strayed repeats throughout her letters, a reminder that she’s writing a column, yes, but she’s also writing it to you, letter-writer. If you want to read Sugar’s words, you must read her advisee’s story first.īut the real listening is in Sugar’s replies. Only here, the letters are long affairs - usually paragraphs, sometimes pages. Like every advice column, each piece here is in two parts: the letter someone sent in and the reply Sugar wrote back. In the book, the pieces are presented in five groups, interspersed with short Q&As with Strayed. The columns in the book were originally written for The Rumpus under the pen name Sugar, and Strayed’s identity was concealed until February. In fact, Strayed writes, “I’ve only seen a therapist a handful of times in my life.” It’s a shocking revelation. The thing is, she’s never met the people she’s scrutinizing, and she’s far from a trained psychoanalyst. In Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of her advice columns, Cheryl Strayed does both adeptly. A good psychoanalyst does two things: she listens, and she dissects.
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