Cheryl Strayed

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

Tiny Beautiful Things

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.

Macy HB

I suppose this is what I mean when I say we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren’t and people we didn’t know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things.

I’ll never know, and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

Also, because it's harder to be magnanimous when you're in your twenties, I think, and so that's why Id like to remind you of it. You're generally less humble in that decade than you’ll ever be and this lack of humility is oddly mixed with insecurity and fear. You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery.

You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all. 

There’s a line by the Italian writer Carlo Levi that I think is apt here; “The future has an ancient heart”. I love it because it expresses with such grace and economy what is certainly true – that who we become is born of who we most primitively are; that we both know and cannot possibly know what it is we've yet to make manifest in our lives.

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

Syrina Akbari

 We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first. 

I know it’s not easy being an artist. I know the Gulf between creation and commerce is so tremendously wide that it’s sometimes impossible not to feel annihilated by it. A lot of artists give up because it’s just too damn hard to go on making art in a culture that buy and large does not support its artist. But the people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity. They’ve taken into their hearts the idea that there is enough for all of us, that success will manifest itself in different ways for different sorts of artists, but keeping the faith is more important than cashing the check, that being genuinely happy for someone else who got some thing you hope to get makes you genuinely happier too.

I no more wanted to be spanked than I wanted to fuck a kangaroo. 

Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that "hell is other people”, which is true enough, but truer still is hell is other beople's boyfriends (or girlfriends, as the case may be).

When we have the guts to look directly into the mirror and say Mary Worth thirteen times without pause and see-thrillingly, terrifyingly that it was never her we had to fear. It was always only us.

 I know because I've lived on a few planets that aren't Planet Earth myself.

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.

Alexandra Sklar

Didn't know what to expect, I'm really only familiar with Cheryl Strayed from "Wild", one of my all time favorites. This sort of advice column is not for me. I do appreciate her writing style and agreed with her words in most cases...found it boring. Just not the book for me.

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.

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

Kenzie

read this because i'm working on the tv adaption and wanted to know what it was about.

it was good but was very much giving chicken soup for the soul vibes. some stories i loved and others weren't for me. but either way i can confirm that the show will be pretty good.

Cindy Lieberman

A thoughtful and lovely collection of responses to readers’ letters, from people of all ages, genders and social classes. (Emails are color-blind and isn’t that refreshing?!) Many touched on relationships with parents, siblings and friends, and many others were about the letter writer’s relationship with self. Both the letters and “Sugar’s” responses were from the heart and occasionally heart breaking. Her responses were sensitive, raw and revealing, occasionally full of tough love and ultimately uplifting and supportive.

Nadine 

Great advice on life straight from the hip!

Astha Prakash

Never thought I'd enjoy a book of advice columns so much. Sugar has made me realize that sometimes solutions to aggravating problems in life are within us, and it's not that difficult to access them. Each question was dealt with so much love, compassion, and straightforwardness. Cheryl's personal experiences were so vivid and beautifully expressed. I'm sure when I'm facing the next big obstacle in life, there'll be a Sugar-like voice in my head telling me how to deal with it. So glad I decided to read this one.

Caroline Lewicki

This book is so amazing. It's impossible to read this without relating to something Cheryl Strayed writes to her advice seekers. She is so eloquent and has such a strong but soothing way of writing her advice column, I felt like she could be my mother. I could read this book again and again.

Lauren Attaway

Tiny Beautiful Things is sweet without being sappy, emotional without being manipulative. There was so much kindness in every page. I listened to the audiobook on loan from the library, so it feels it like I've been binging an advice podcast from my friend Cheryl. She speaks and writes with so much empathy it's easy to feel like you know her or she understands, even when the situation is one-of-a-kind. Such a pleasant way to pass the time!

Fatin Allen

I am swooned by the rawness and the bareness shown throughout the book. Some letters I relate closely, some, I could only empathise. I admire all the beautiful proses despite its naked and harsh truth. Some advices are rational, which I needed. Nonetheless, I feel like I can appreciate this book better in a few more years (I'm still in my early 20s).

Definitely, a strong recommendation for anyone who is ready to embrace life and navigate bravely through its highs and lows.

Melody Izard

Dear friends, Even if you don't need Sugar's advice, you do need mine. Read this book. Or better yet, listen to Sugar read it to you.

Yours, Queen.

Rose Stanley

Two thoughts kept popping into my head when I was reading this:
(1) This woman has seen some serious s**t
(2) Boy, can this woman WRITE

In this collection, Cheryl 'Sugar' Strayed answers letter after letter from people in all kinds of situations and from all walks of life who are trying to untangle the messiness that is being a person dealing with those pesky things called emotions - and does so with wisdom, patience, compassion, honesty, vulnerability and sound common sense. 

A couple of the responses made me tear up a little. So did some of the original letters. 

HIGHLY recommend.

Tiny Beautiful Things Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Reviews

Highlights