Cheryl Strayed was born in 1968 and grew up in a working-class family in Minnesota. From a young age, she knew she wanted to be a writer and even received a letter of encouragement from the Canadian short-story master Alice Munro. Still, she took the long route to publication, receiving an English and Women’s Studies degree at the University of Minnesota and an MA in fiction at Syracuse University in 2002. Her first novel, Torch, was published in 2005, with Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things following in 2012. In 2015 she published Brave Enough: A Mini Instruction Manual for the Soul.

Strayed’s writing has always balanced literary craft, memoir, and self-help, and this made her a natural fit for being Sugar. In addition to her writing skill, Strayed draws upon formative personal experiences, such as losing her mother to cancer in 1991 when she was only 22, wanting to leave her first marriage, to Marco Littig, and venturing out on her own path, both personally and in her career. She also draws upon the joys and difficulties of her more recent experiences of creating a nuclear family with her second husband, Brian Lindstrom.

Despite the anonymity of The Rumpus columns that make up Tiny Beautiful Things, Sugar emerges as a distinct personality.