Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, originally published in 2012, is a compilation of American author Cheryl Strayed’s advice columns for The Rumpus, written between 2010 and 2012. At The Rumpus Strayed wrote anonymously under the pseudonym Sugar; however, by the end of 2012, Tiny Beautiful Things was published under her real name, and her memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, had become a New York Times number one bestseller and was the first book chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s book club.

Strayed’s Sugar has remained a staple of advice-giving. After resigning from column writing at The Rumpus in 2012, she has since appeared on the Dear Sugars podcast with Steve Almond (2014-2018) and the New York Times podcast Sugar Calling (2020).

This guide uses the eBook version of the 2022 10th-anniversary edition published by Atlantic Books Ltd.

Note: The eBook edition does not contain page numbers for the advice letters in Part 6 of the book.

Content Warning: The source material discusses substance abuse, sexual assault, and child sexual abuse.

Summary

Tiny Beautiful Things begins with a preface by Strayed explaining that when she initially took on the unpaid post of advice columnist for The Rumpus in 2010, she thought it would be fun. However, the work transpired to have true value for her, becoming something she devoted significant energy to, as she found herself relating to her correspondents and sharing her stories with them. An introduction by Steve Almond, the original Sugar and eventually Strayed’s cohost on the podcast Dear Sugars, then goes on to explain why Strayed was the perfect person to write as Sugar, given her radical tendency to forgo the distant role of an expert in favor of baring her personal experience so that her correspondents might understand their own problems through hers.

Parts 1-5 of Tiny Beautiful Things feature a selection of the letters Strayed received while she was at The Rumpus, between 2010 and 2012. Each part contains letters on a range of issues, and similar predicaments appear as the book progresses. Recurring problems include: 20-somethings who are afraid they are wasting their lives; would-be writers who want to be great but are afraid to start; bereaved people who are reconciling with unbearable loss; dilemmas over whether to become estranged from abusive family members; and the desire to leave relationships with good partners in order to pursue individual paths. Strayed, who received more correspondence than she could answer, admits that she had a bias toward well-written letters with problems she could relate to. Thus, the above list of recurring problems relates to the dominant crisis points in her own life, including: emerging as a writer in her twenties and early thirties, despite financial and personal hardship; healing from the premature death of her mother; drawing boundaries with her abusive father, and leaving her first husband because the relationship was wrong for her at that time. As Strayed tackles readers’ experiences of such issues, different facets of her personal story come through in her answers. While she tends to respond to each letter individually, sometimes, as with the section titled “The Truth That Lives There” in Part 2, she answers a group of letters—in this case, on the theme of wanting to leave a relationship with a well-intentioned partner—in tandem, explaining that their stories are in conversation with one another in a helpful and affirmative way. She believes that showing correspondents that others have grappled with the same questions offers a healing answer, as they would feel less alone and less culpable in wanting to leave a good partner. She then proceeds to share her own story of leaving her first husband, in the service of living out her own truth and trusting her instincts.

Part 6 differs from the other parts, as it answers letters that were written about 10 years later to Strayed’s Substack newsletter. In this section, the letters reflect both the sociopolitical changes of the last 10 years, including the recent pandemic, in addition to Strayed’s evolved life stage. For example, while The Rumpus’s Sugar was an early-forties mother of young children who was on the cusp of publishing her major work Wild, the Substack Sugar is in her early fifties, menopausal and a major figure in both the literary and personal development scenes. While Strayed continues to answer correspondents of all ages, she relates especially to a 48-year-old nurse who experiences exhaustion as a result of work and home demands. Then a letter from an aspiring activist who identifies as a woman of color specifically references the culture wars of the past few years and stands out from the correspondents of Sugar’s Rumpus tenure for being politically engaged and alluding to her ethnicity. Race was an absent topic in the selection of letters from The Rumpus years, with correspondents focusing on personal rather than political problems and never mentioning their ethnicity. In her introduction to this section, Strayed suggests that the sociopolitical changes of the intervening decade have reaffirmed the importance of continuing the advice column.