Tiny beautiful things : advice on love and life from Dear Sugar /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Soon to be a Hulu Original series * The internationally acclaimed author of Wild collects the best of The Rumpus 's Dear Sugar advice columns plus never-before-published pieces. Rich with humor and insight--and absolute honesty--this "wise and compassionate" ( New York Times Book Review) 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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction (p. 3)
• Part I It was Always Only Us
• Like an Iron Bell (p. 13)
• How You Get Unstuck (p. 19)
• That Ecstatic Parade (p. 31)
• A Motorcycle with No One on It (p. 37)
• The Reckoning (p. 39)
• There's a Bundle on Your Head (p. 48)
• Write Like a Motherfucker (p. 53)
• A New, More Fractured Light (p. 61)
• Dudes in the Woods (p. 64)
• Icky Thoughts Turn Me On (p. 73)
• Reach (p. 78)
• Part II Whatever Mysterious Starlight that Guided You this Far
• The Baby Bird (p. 89)
• Go! Go! Go! (p. 92)
• The Black Arc of It (p. 94)
• Hell Is Other People's Boyfriends (p. 100)
• Thwack, Thwack, Thwack (p. 104)
• The Woman Hanging on the End of the Line (p. 110)
• No Mystery About Sperm (p. 115)
• The Mad Sex Confessor (p. 124)
• The Future Has an Ancient Heart (p. 128)
• Faux Friendship Footsie (p. 135)
• The Human Scale (p. 139)
• Part III Carry the Water Yourself
• Beauty and the Beast (p. 149)
• I Chose van Gogh (p. 158)
• The Other Side of the Pool (p. 160)
• The Truth That Lives There (p. 166)
• Too Much Paint (p. 175)
• Tiny Revolutions (p. 178)
• Not Enough (p. 185)
• No Is Golden (p. 187)
• Romantic Love Is Not a Competitive Sport (p. 193)
• A Big Life (p. 199)
• The Known Unknowns (p. 209)
• On Your Island (p. 212)
• Part IV You Don't have to be Broken for Me
• The Magic of Wanting to Be (p. 217)
• A Glorious Something Else (p. 223)
• A Tunnel That Wakes You (p. 231)
• How the Real Work Is Done (p. 233)
• The Ghost Ship That Didn't Carry Us (p. 241)
• Your Invisible Inner Terrible Someone (p. 249)
• Waiting by the Phone (p. 253)
• We Are All Savages Inside (p. 257)
• The Lusty Broad (p. 264)
• The Bad Things You Did (p. 268)
• Bend (p. 274)
• The Obliterated Place (p. 277)
• Part V Put it in a Box and Wait
• A Bit of Sully in Your Sweet (p. 289)
• We Are Here to Build the House (p. 299)
• The Empty Bowl (p. 304)
• Transcend (p. 312)
• A Shimmering Slice of Your Mysterious Destiny (p. 317)
• The Ordinary Miraculous (p. 320)
• We Call This a Clusterfuck (p. 324)
• Are You My Mother? (p. 335)
• Ten Angry Boys (p. 338)
• Tiny Beautiful Things (p. 350)
• Acknowledgments (p. 355)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar By Cheryl Strayed Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group ISBN: 9780307949332 From the INTRODUCTION by Steve Almond I Was Sugar Once : Lessons in Radical Empathy Long ago, before there was a Sugar, there was Stephen Elliott. He had this idea for a website, which sounds pretty awful, I admit, except that his idea was really to build an online community around literature, called The Rumpus . Being a writer himself, and therefore impoverished, Stephen prevailed upon his likewise impoverished writer friends to help. And we, his friends, all said yes, because we love Stephen and because (if I may speak for the group) we were all desperate for a noble-seeming distraction. My contribution was an advice column, which I suggested we call Dear Sugar Butt, after the endearment Stephen and I had taken to using in our email correspondence. I will not belabor the goofy homoeroticism that would lead to such an endearment. It will be enough to note that Dear Sugar Butt was shortened, mercifully, to Dear Sugar. Handing yourself a job as an advice columnist is a pretty arrogant thing to do, which is par for my particular course. But I justified it by supposing that I could create a different sort of advice column, both irreverent and brutally honest. The design flaw was that I conceived of Sugar as a persona, a woman with a troubled past and a slightly reckless tongue. And while there were moments when she felt real to me, when I could feel myself locking into the pain of my correspondents, more often I faked it, making do with wit where my heart failed me. After a year of dashing off columns, I quit. And that might have been the end of Sugar had I not, around this time, come across a nonfiction piece by Cheryl Strayed. I knew Cheryl as the author of a gorgeous and wrenching novel called Torch. But reading this essay, a searing recollection of infidelity and mourning, filled me with a tingling hunch. I wrote to ask if she wanted to take over as Sugar. It was an insane request. Like me, Cheryl had two small kids at home, a mountain of debt, and no regular academic gig. The last thing she needed was an online advice column for which she would be paid nothing. Of course, I did have an ace in the hole: Cheryl had written the one and only fan letter I'd received as Sugar. *** The column that launched Sugar as a phenomenon was writ- ten in response to what would have been, for anyone else, a throwaway letter. Dear Sugar, wrote a presumably young man. WTF, WTF, WTF? I'm asking this question as it applies to everything every day . Cheryl's reply began as follows: Dear WTF, My father's father made me jack him off when I was three and four and five. I wasn't any good at it. My hands were too small and I couldn't get the rhythm right and I didn't understand what I was doing. I only knew I didn't want to do it. Knew that it made me feel miserable and anxious in a way so sickeningly particular that I can feel that same particular sickness rising this very minute in my throat. It was an absolutely unprecedented moment. Advice columnists, after all, adhere to an unspoken code: focus on the letter writer, dispense the necessary bromides, make it all seem bearable. Disclosing your own sexual assault is not part of the code. But Cheryl wasn't just trying to shock some callow kid into greater compassion. She was announcing the nature of her mission as Sugar. Inexplicable sorrows await all of us. That was her essential point. Life isn't some narcissistic game you play online. It all matters--every sin, every regret, every affliction. As proof, she offered an account of her own struggle to reckon with a cruelty she'd absorbed before she was old enough even to understand it. Ask better questions, sweet pea, she concluded, with great gentleness. The fuck is your life. Answer it. Like a lot of folks, I read the piece with tears in my eyes-- which is how one reads Sugar. This wasn't some pro forma kibitzer, sifting through a stack of modern anxieties. She was a real human being laying herself bare, fearlessly, that we might come to understand the nature of our own predicaments. *** I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives--those fountains of inconvenient feeling--and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market. We're hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we're falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won't stick. And this, I think, is why Sugar has become so important to so many people. Because she's offering something almost unheard of in our culture: radical empathy. People come to her in real pain and she ministers to them, by telling stories about her own life, the particular ways in which she's felt thwarted and lost, and how she got found again. She is able to transmute the raw material of the self-help aisle into genuine literature. I think here of the response she offered a man wrecked by his son's death, who asked her how he might become human again. "The strange and painful truth is that I'm a better person because I lost my mom young," she wrote. "When you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place." In this sense, Tiny Beautiful Things can be read as a kind of ad hoc memoir. But it's a memoir with an agenda. With great patience, and eloquence, she assures her readers that within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue. *** Excerpted from Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher. Excerpted from Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This beloved Internet advice columnist, using the pseudonym Sugar, revealed herself in early 2012 to be the acclaimed novelist and memoirist Strayed (Wild). First appearing on The Rumpus (therumpus.net) in 2010, her column "Dear Sugar" quickly attracted a large and devoted following with its cut-to-the-quick aphorisms like "Write like a motherfucker" and "Be brave enough to break your own heart." This collection gathers up the best of Sugar, whose trademark is deeply felt and frank responses grounded in her own personal experience. In many ways, it is a portrait of Strayed herself: she describes her estranged father, her passionate but doomed first marriage, her relationship with her current husband (Mr. Sugar), and, most thoroughly, her much-missed mother, who died suddenly while Strayed was in college. She answers queries on subjects ranging from professional jealousy to leaving a loved partner to coping with the death of a child to a (not-so) simple "WTF?" VERDICT Part advice, part personal essay, these pieces grapple with life's biggest questions. Beautifully written and genuinely wise, this book is full of heartache and love. Highly recommended.-Molly McArdle, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Strayed (Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail), in this collection of advice (some previously unpublished) for readers of her column "Dear Sugar" on therumpus.net, chooses thought-provoking questions from her readers and listens deeply to their emotional content. In casually intimate prose (to a struggling writer: "dear sweet arrogant beautiful crazy tortured talented rising star glowbug") and literary grace, she creates moments of wise, compassionate insight in often startlingly personal miniature memoirs, cradling gentle but practical guidance with enough humor to cement Strayed's presence as both a mentor and the most understanding of friends. Sugar can be tough and honest (to the same struggling writer: "buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing [in your letter], there's arrogance at its core"), but she's never mean: in Sugar's world, we all deserve love unconditionally, but also owe it to ourselves to act in the world to be the best, most authentic selves that we can be. For a regrounding in the beauty of what it means to be flawed and gorgeously human, for answers that feel real whether we've been able to ask the right question, Strayed's caring little essays offer surprisingly rich comfort. Agent: Zachary Shuster Harnsworth Agency. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Strayed caused a stir when she revealed herself to be the writer behind the popular advice column Dear Sugar right after the success of her memoir, Wild (2011), the first pick for Oprah's new book club. So it makes good sense to publish a collection of selected letters from the column. But this is no mere marketing ploy. Strayed has selected stories of heartbreak and sorrow, guilt and anguish, and revealed how all of them embody the fact that suffering is life, and life is beautiful. There is something profoundly comforting in the realization that while, as humans, we are all deeply and consistently flawed, this is no reason to despair. Strayed makes this point again and again with a combination of bottomless empathy and a few hard, honest truths. The letters are grouped together in sections that begin with brief interviews with Strayed, though it's unclear what precisely the common thread for each group is. Strayed's fans will be delighted with this intimate glimpse into her past, and advice seekers will find plenty to chew on.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Strayed (Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, 2012, etc.) offers insight into the world of online advice through her collection of letters sent to "Dear Sugar," her once-anonymous column for the online magazine The Rumpus. Sugar's Golden Rule--"Trust Yourself"--pushes the author and her readers to embrace themselves and not be afraid of asking life's complex questions. Strayed writes that she will "answer anything, so long as it interests or challenges or touches me." Men and women of all ages contact her hoping she can solve their problems, which include affairs, the loss of a loved one, self-acceptance and understanding the point of existence. In thematic sections, the author presents verbatim letters and their detailed published replies. Strayed's practical advice mixes with abundant personal anecdotes in which she illustrates to the addressee the reasoning behind her counsel. Admittedly not versed in psychology, her responses are sensitive and comprehensive, and her verbose self-reflection projects understanding and sympathy. Though she avoids medical jargon, Strayed suggests medical counseling when it is necessary. The author demonstrates her forthright personality in a comforting yet stern writing style that connects readers to each contributor's plight and the subsequent response to their cry for help. Appealing to Dear Sugar fans and self-help seekers alike, this "collection of intimate exchanges between strangers" demonstrates that wisdom doesn't come only from age, but also from learning from the experiences of others. A realistic and poignant compilation of the intricacies of relationships.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Cheryl Strayed, née Nyland, was born on September 17, 1968 in Spangler, Pennsylvania. She is an American memoirist, novelist and essayist. Her second book, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail was published in the United States on March 20, 2012, and has been translated into more than thirty languages. It is an Oprah Book Club 2.0 choice, made the New York Times Bestseller list and was optioned for film rights by Reese Witherspoon even before it was published. The film is scheduled to be released in 2014.

Strayed's first book, the novel Torch, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February 2006. She attended the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree, graduating magna cum laude with a double major in English and Women's Studies. A long-time feminist activist, Strayed served on the first board of directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

(Bowker Author Biography)