Tiny Beautiful Things

I've lost too many patients in the last year. I love them, and I lose them and I feel like I keep losing little pieces of my soul. I don't know how long I can keep doing this. I tell myself my love for them matters, and my care matters even if they die, but I don't know if I still believe it.

That's how I opened my spiritual check-in this year. The rabbi nodded, and then said: “Read Tiny Beautiful Things.” He handed me a copy to browse. “Can I borrow it?” I asked. “No, I need it too often.” I found the advice perplexing and a little out of left field. But, sure, why not.

Reader, it was good advice. Very good advice. Cheryl Strayed knows bad things happen. She knows bad things happen to good people and we have to keep on living and loving, anyway. And she loves us all and calls us Sweet Pea when we're hurt or burning out. This is that book. I cried reading the letters about the ways in which the world was bad to people and was salved by Strayed's radical empathy. I've never read Dear Sugar. I don't know if these letters are representative. What I do know is through them, Strayed (ironically operating under a nom de plume) is not just radically empathetic, but also radically honest. She talks about her own life, her mom's death, the dissolution of her first marriage, the times that she couldn't be the person she wanted to be. She has a way of talking about herself as a means to make other people feel seen and more human.

Reading it was profoundly cathartic. I felt the protective shell I'd built up dissolving. I felt returned to the person I wanted to be. People came to me with the stories of the way the world had been bad to them and I felt ready again to be there with them, holding the badness, and then moving forward.

You can't borrow my copy. I'm going to need it too often.

Dear Sugar offers us ‘Radical Empathy' at a time when we need it most. This collection of letters and advice will make you laugh and weep and feel more connected to the letter writers and to Strayed and to all of humanity. Perhaps none of the letters will resonate with you, make you stop in your tracks (though I bet at least one of them will). But I guarantee this book will make you more connected to the vast world of messed up humans which we live in. And that's beautiful.

More 3.5 than 3.

A lot of of touching letters and pure human moments. There's a lot of sweetness in Sugar's answers to her readers problems, while also staying quite relevant, honest and sometimes even “brutally honest”. Still those letters are sometimes uneven, some were very touching and endearing, others were quite common and not really interesting. I doubt it'll leave a big mark in my mind, but I was still touched by some beautiful humanity moments here and there.

I LOVE Sugar. I'd already read most of these online at The Rumpus, but I still enjoyed the experience of re-reading them.

Sugar is so, so wise.

(If you're not familiar with Sugar, why not do yourself a favor and read her advice to her younger self? Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.)

And then read the whole book.

In the last half of 2015, I didn't quite know it yet but I was about to go through one of the hardest months of my life in a long, long time. And when my downstairs neighbor gave me this book as a parting gift, little did I know that it would be one of the lifeboats that go me through to now. And with that said I feel obliged to offer the caveat that my review is very influenced by how much this book was very well-timed in my life.

It's not a technically perfect book; for me, mostly just in terms of pacing. The letters are divided into sections that seemed at first to be loosely centered on a theme, but by the end I wasn't so sure, and once I passed the halfway point I began to realize that the book is very front-loaded. The stakes in the letters in the first half of the book are high - like, HIGH-high - and Cheryl-as-Sugar's responses are heavily interwoven with stories from her own life that mirror or contrast the plight at hand. These are the most beautiful and moving. More of these high-stakes, heartbreaking, achingly loving letters are peppered throughout the second half, but are much fewer and far between and the rest, though much elevated, veer towards more standard agony aunt fare. Her responses to these are less lyrical, more direct, and weave in her own life story parallels less often. Ultimately, this just poses an issue if you read the book from cover to cover. Reading it in a nonlinear fashion and just opening randomly and jumping from story to story is a very valid way of approaching this book and largely makes this one criticism moot.

And that criticism is such a small one for me. This book fell in my lap exactly when I needed it, and it made me cry when I just needed to cry, it gave me hope when I was completely overwhelmed, and it made me give myself stern talkings-to when I was feeling sorry for myself. I've noticed a few people call out some of her perhaps less-than-ideal advice and have noticed some of her recurring biases, but none of this bothered me or detracted from the experience. Some of these letters had my sides aching with laughter, more of them had me truly ruminating on how we deal with the “big” things in life, more than a few had me weeping fat, rolling tears and some even had me doing all of those things at once. As a piece of writing, it is a resounding success. It is not merely a compiled collection of agony aunt letters. It is a fully realized piece of art grown out of an implicit understanding of the human condition.

The beauty and value in this book is not that Cheryl Strayed is a counsellor or therapist - she is not, and reminds the reader of that multiple times - but rather that it's a vivid demonstration of compassion in its most earnest and genuine sense. These letters are from broken, troubled, lost humans reaching out for a connection, and the responses glow with an altruism and true warmth of spirit. And how many of us have been broken and troubled and lost and looking for some warmth and some unconditional acceptance, and for another human being - even a stranger - to tell us that it's okay to be broken and troubled and lost?

This book is a rollercoaster of emotions. Strayed draws a lot of stories from her own life (some of them very dark) to answer questions from her readers. Collected all together, her columns read almost like a memoir or autobiography. If anything, you should read the entry for which the book is titled: http://therumpus.net/2011/02/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-64.

Before writing Wild, which relaunched Oprah's Book Club, and is of course being made into a movie, Cheryl Strayed wrote an advice column for The Rumpus online. This is a collection of her advice there.

To reduce it to a compendium of online advice is to diminish its beautiful writing. Like the best advice columnists, while I may not wrestle with the conundrum of whether I should have sex for money or attend Christmas with a drug addicted and abusive brother, there is in each answer a kernel of something bigger and potentially relevant to everyone. Without resorting to fey sentimentality, this is a book I'll revisit over and over again when I need a bit of acceptance and understanding, you may find it does the same for you too sweet pea ;)