Name: Tiny Beautiful Things
Rating: 4.317307692307693 (156 reviews)
ISBN: 9781782390695

Cheryl Strayed

Rich with humor, insight, compassion - and absolute honesty - Tiny Beautful Things is a balm for everything life throws our way, from the author of Wild.

Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who's Been There

Tiny Beautiful Things

Collects top-selected postings on life and relationships from The Rumpus' popular "Dear Sugar" online column, sharing recommendations on everything from infidelity and grief to marital boredom and financial hardships. Original. 40,000 first printing.

Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Greg Talbot

Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe If you want it direct, you're probably talking to a lawyer, a doctor or a mechanic; the deep stuff, the advice we seek, is always delivered in a more elusive way. Strayed stories stray easily from the original question, but just as easily convey deeper truths about how we find ourselves, and each other across the fragile painful hurts we can throw to each other. Often we get glimpses of herself and the hardscrabble lives of children she encountered as a social worker. Her advice is never really right or wrong; she goes for deeper empathy and magnanimity. In letters to twenty-sometimes, the advice is as irreverent as it is deeply moving. For anyone who lives with poetry or dialogue of a play that just consumes you; the advice to devour and internalize great art hits at the deeper truth. In her letter to a grieving father, a discursive and bitterly angry man who lost his son in a drunk driving acciden. Her advice holds the darkness, and her ending line just rips your heart out. And Strayed discusses the part of us we ridicule and minimize, because it's too scary to talk about. Real love. Real love moves freeing between us (p.350), a candle worth fighting for, something beautiful we make, something we should lose comfort to find. Her words find poetry and imagery that are both startling and warming the type of advice you would expect from someone who has felt a little harder and lost a little more. For all of us in the pandemic, with both too much time to ourselves, and an ever awareness that there is just not enough time, these advice columns beautifully render the complexity and fragileness of being human. You can't help but thing about your own situation, the values you are living, the things you are holding on to, the people we have denied part of our story, including parts of ourselves. At one point Strayed offers, every bad decision she has ever made, she knew it when she did. Drugs, improper sexual relations, stealing, lying. All of it, with terrible consequences. Lost in our egos , rightness or pettiness, Strayed pushes away the question of what's right to do - it's obvious and we feel it. But it's not about that. This cold hard unforgiving world weighs all of us...and maybe we can learn something valuable from all this lost and suffering. We want more than a balm and platitudes. And what better way to share this honesty than by sharing of stories.

Jennifer

I’m a sucker for advice columns, painful truths, self-help, and memoirs, so I loved this book! It’s a quick read and really hits you in the gut with the trials and tribulations of the human condition. Everyone I know or have ever met (including you!) can relate to at least one letter in here. You should read this, find the advice that applies to you, and improve yourself to make the world a better place. I promise you there is at least one pearl of wisdom in here that will punch you in the gut and offend you because you know her words are too real and can help. I didn’t necessarily agree with Sugar about every little thing but I got what I needed from her advice on the topics that were helpful for me. Everything else was just entertaining.

This bestselling book from the author of Wild collects the best of The Rumpus's Dear Sugar advice columns plus never-before-published pieces. "Wise and compassionate" (New York Times Book Review), and rich with humor and insight—and absolute honesty—this book is a balm for everything life throws our way. 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.

Definitely a good book to have on hand if you’re a busy parent as it can be put down and picked back up at a later time, which is basically life with a toddler for any activity. Some stories were more profound than others, but I found myself a little bothered by the almost condescending tone of the author to those seeking advice. At times, it seemed a bit like a scolding in some responses rather than genuine help. Overall, not bad and one specific piece was scarily relatable, but probably won’t pick this one up again.

Rich with humour, insight, compassion - and absolute honesty - Tiny Beautiful Things is a balm for everything life throws our way, administered by the author of the New York Times-bestselling memoir, Wild Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you, you lose a family member, you can't pay the bills. But it can be pretty great, too: you've had the hottest sex of your life, you get that plum job, you muster the courage to write your novel. Everyday across the world, people go through the full and glorious gamut of life - but sometimes, a little advice is needed. For several years, thousands turned to Cheryl Strayed, a then-anonymous internet Agony Aunt. But unlike most Agony Aunts, this one's advice was spun from genuine compassion and informed by a wealth of personal experience - experience that was sometimes tragic and sometimes tender, often hilarious and often heartbreaking. Having successfully battled her own demons while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed sat down to answer the letters of the frightened, the anxious, the confused; and with each gem-like correspondence - of which the best are collected in this volume - she proved to be the perfect guide for those who had got a little lost in life.

Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There

Clare

3.5 stars

I liked this book, but I didn't love it. I wish that I had been reading something else while I read this one, because this could have been picked up and put down here and there vs. reading it straight through. Because of its format, it didn't flow like a normal book does, and that made it less engaging for me.

1.5 stars rounded up

This book came highly praised and I get why some people would like it and connect with the advice and stories presented here. Unfortunately, that was not me. I couldn't help but find most of Cheryl's responses here as cold, impersonal, even condescending at times.

Ozge Kara

This worked amazing as an Audiobook and I devoured every minute of it.

Love love love this book so much. I will be getting my own copy so I can go back to my favorite articles (which tbh is a majority of them). Sugar's responses made me cry and laugh and look harder at my life and understand my relationships better and feel less alone.

Bethany

Tara C

Probably one of the best reads I've had lately --- there was no entry that I didn't clutch my heart. I already knew from the Internet's review of Cheryl Strayed's advice column turned into a book. It was a memoir disguised as an advice column, of which Strayed did pretty well. All I could think of was how much Cheryl went through as a human being and all throughout the book, I could feel the pain from the letter senders and Cheryl herself. 

I also have to admit that many times, Cheryl pushed the envelope in adjusting what I've believed all these years. For example, in "A Bit of Sully in Your Sweet" challenges the belief of infidelity as an end all and be all ultimatum of marriage and love. Acceptance is a small quiet room, not some guy in a bar that's easy to come to. The book is chock full of worldly wisdom that transcends time as it does to me today. What a beautiful read. Thank you for your words, Cheryl Strayed.

Alexa M

God I loved this. Even stories that didn't relate to me at all, I would devour anything and everything Sugar has to say. This is gonna stay with me a while.

Shelby Stahl

Jeannette Ordas

This is the book that I should own and lend out to friends because there's a story and advice for everyone. Inspiring, heart-warming, sad, sweet - it's a pretty wondrous read.

Arturo Hernández

This book is a collection of letters from writers to a lovely internet persona that goes by the name of Sugar. Readers send letters about their life, complications, struggles, decisions and more. And she replies in a very non-chalant way while pretty much wearing her heart on her sleeve.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:
* The strange and painful truth is that I'm a better person because I lost my mom young.
* Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.
*I know it's hard to write darling. But it's harder not to.
* Some things are so sad and wrong and unanswerable that the question must simply stand alone like a spear in the mud.
* There are some things you can't understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding.

Amy Thibodeau

This book split me open and then put me back together agin. Loved it.

Part advice, part philosophical musing, part memoir. Just hands-down beautiful writing. Listened on audio, which was an especially intimate experience as CS narrated herself.

Sarah Erle

The beginning and the end were powerful, but the middle lacked the importance that I so desperately craved after being lead into it with tears streaming down my face and my heart torn open-ready to be absolutely devastated in the most heart-wrenching but soul-building of ways. Maybe the problem is simply that only some takes resonated. Only some people’s circumstances were cared for.

Syrina

Stacey Rainey 

Oh Sugar. I stopped because it was hard in spots and I stopped b.c I didn't want it to end and maybe I skipped some letters, but yowza honeybun, you reframed some thinking and for that I thank you.

Ri Liu

Nadine 

Great advice on life straight from the hip!

Tiny Beautiful Things Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who's Been There

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