If there is a common thread that unites the columns, it’s work. A place to lose your heart and find it again. the edge of the dark wood, staring into the place where the most wrenching and lovely truths reside. So it took me by surprise when, upon discovering Dear Sugar at the Rumpus, I gradually fell down the rabbit hole into ridiculous fangirlishness for the first time in years. It’s so emotionally taxing, so inherently undignified, that I try not to fall into the trap. “It is very rarely that I am a ridiculous fangirl about anything.
DEAR SUGAR RUMPUS FULL
“As Sugar, Strayed addresses questions about love, family, addition, grief, abuse, afflictions, fears, friends, gossip, among other topics-and in each of her answers, without fail, she meets the letter writers with a kind of startling compassion what Steve Almond termed ‘radical empathy.’ Dear Sugar is an advice column like no other.” -Nika Knight, Full Stop In the end, Tiny Beautiful Things serves as a guide for anyone who is lost, and those who only think they might be.” -Liz Colville, San Francisco Chronicle Strayed has covered much ground in these transformative pieces. Here is Strayed’s breathtaking ability to get to the core of her own failures and triumphs, which she often does through surprising and sharp imagery.
Often, the fuller picture that Strayed gives us illustrates what needs to happen for the letter-writers to change, to pull themselves out of their current predicament, to see things in a different way, to act. What runs through all the columns, which range from a few hundred to a few thousand words in length, is Strayed’s gift at panning out from the problem in question. Her experiences are qualifications, in a sense, as Strayed has taken the wisdom she gained from personal tragedies, including her mother's early death and the breakup of her first marriage, and generously applied it to all manner of issues. Strayed has succeeded largely because she shares personal, often heartbreaking stories from her own life in answering readers' questions. Strayed’s columns, now collected as Tiny Beautiful Things, advise people on such diverse struggles as miscarriage, infidelity, poverty and addiction, and it's really hard to think of anyone better at the job.
Strayed has proved during her tenure at the website the Rumpus, where she has helmed the Dear Sugar column since 2010, that the only requirement is that you give great advice-tender, frank, uplifting and unrelenting. In her responses, Strayed shines a torch of insight and comfort into the darkness of these people’s lives, cutting to the heart of what it means to love, to grieve and to suffer.” -Ilana Teitelbaum, Shelf Awareness Strayed offers insights as exquisitely phrased as they are powerful, confronting some of the biggest and most painful of life’s questions. Part memoir, part essay collection, the aptly titled Tiny Beautiful Things gathers together stunningly written pieces on everything from sex to love to the agonies of bereavement.
“It seems inadequate to call ‘Dear Sugar’ an advice column, because it exists in a category all its own. “Wise and compassionate.” -Gregory Cowles, New York Times Book Review “Inside the List” The book’s disclosures-on the part of both the writer and her correspondents-is ultimately courageous and engaging stuff.” -Anna Holmes, New York Times Book Review “Strayed’s worldview-her empathy, her nonjudgment, her belief in the fundamental logic of people’s emotions and experiences despite occasional evidence to the contrary-begins to seep into readers’ consciousness in such a way that they can apply her generosity of spirit to their own and, for a few hours at least, become better people. Strayed is an eloquent storyteller, and her clear-eyed prose offers a bracing empathy absent from most self-help blather.” -Nora Krug, The Washington Post “A fascinating blend of memoir and self-help.
Collected in a book, they make for riveting, emotionally charged reading (translation: be prepared to bawl) that leaves you significantly wiser for the experience. The result: intimate, in-depth essays that not only took the letter writer’s life into account but also Strayed’s. “Penning an advice column for the literary website The Rumpus, worked anonymously, using the pen name Sugar, replying to letters from readings suffering everything from loveless marriages to abusive, drug-addicted brothers to disfiguring illnesses.
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