Tiny Beautiful Things

This is a collection of Cheryl Strayed's Dear Sugar columns from the online literary magazine The Rumpus, written anonymously before her identity was known. The form is an advice column and the practice is unusual within it. Rather than issuing a verdict on a letter writer's problem, Strayed typically answers by telling something from her own life that cost her something, so the columns read as much as memoir as advice, and the counsel arrives as a consequence of the story rather than as a rule. The subjects are the ones people write to strangers about: grief, money, jealousy, infidelity, ambition, addiction, the fear of having chosen wrongly. What this vault is likely to want from it is the method rather than any single answer, since the book is a demonstration that self-disclosure can carry authority where instruction cannot. It is a work of essays, not of research.

Written from the public record for the book.

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Not audited here. 1 note in this vault draws on it.

People

• Cheryl Strayed