Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Strayed’s cohost of the podcast Dear Sugars was initially the voice of Sugar on The Rumpus. However, he acknowledges that he was incompetent at the job and credits Strayed with saving the column, given her willingness to share her personal stories and so be vulnerable. In doing so, she went against the unspoken code of advice columnists to remain anonymous and focus on the letter writer.

Almond argues that Strayed’s brand of radical empathy is essential in consumerist America, where loneliness has reached epidemic proportions. Tiny Beautiful Things offers both solace and the reminder that one can find meaning in even the most painful events. For Almond, Sugar is the best kind of mother, offering “enough compassion to make us feel safe within our broken need, and enough wisdom to hold on to hope” (7).

The letters featured in the book were either written to The Rumpus or sent directly to Sugar’s email. For the most part, both sender and respondent were anonymous to each other. Sugar’s criteria for selecting the letters to respond to is “highly subjective,” as she gravitates to what interests, challenges, or moves her (12).

Following the end of a 20-year marriage, a man who calls himself Johnny has dabbled in new relationships. Each time, he avoids declaring that he loves his new partner, fearing that the word love “comes loaded with promises and commitments that are highly fragile and easily broken” (13). He asks Sugar what love is all about and when the right time for declaring it is.

Sugar replies that her dying mother’s final word to her was “love” (14), going on to explain that this is relevant to how she answers Johnny’s question because she considers love to be the most fundamental thing in the world—and something that can take myriad complex forms. She advises Johnny to embrace love before he dies and therefore not hesitate to tell his present partner he loves her. He is not afraid of love itself but rather of all the unnecessary ideas of duty he has adjoined to the concept. She encourages him to reflect on what happened in his 20-year marriage to make him so skeptical of love.

A woman who calls herself Stuck asks for Sugar’s advice on how to move on from a miscarriage that occurred at six and a half months. She knew that she was carrying a daughter and had even named her. A doctor suggested that Stuck contributed to the miscarriage by being overweight, which made her pregnancy high-risk. Now, subsumed with feelings of guilt, she struggles to get out of bed and has developed disordered eating patterns. While her boyfriend wants them to move on, get married, and try for another child, Stuck is angry that he does not grieve their daughter in the same way.

Sugar urges Stuck to find a support group of women who have been through a similar bereavement, as the people in her life who are telling her to get over her daughter’s death are not aiding her healing. Sugar states that while they live on Planet Earth, Stuck lives on “Planet My Baby Died” (21). She should be honest with her boyfriend, listening to his experience of bereavement. When she eventually moves on, she will be able to live a life “that includes the sad loss of [her] daughter but is not arrested by it” (22). Sugar relates how she administered this lesson to a youth group of middle-school girls who had been through extremes of poverty and manifold types of abuse. She told the girls that they had to work to escape being trapped in a cycle of poverty and deprivation and run in the direction of their dreams. While this would not take away the bad things that happened to them, they, like Stuck, had the power to endure and heal.

A 21-year-old gay man called Suffocated wants Sugar’s advice on whether to continue residing with his religious anti-gay parents, who consider his sexual orientation a sin, or to move out and live with a friend on the other side of the country in the Pacific Northwest. This would be difficult because he would have to leave his boyfriend on the East Coast and cut ties with his family.

Sugar unequivocally advises Suffocated to do everything within his power to get out of his parents’ home, as his psychological well-being and ability to live as his true self is paramount. She adds that if his parents do disown him, their love for him hinges on nothing, as parental love is meant to be unconditional even if a child turns out to be “someone they didn’t precisely imagine” (34).

A married, middle-aged man who calls himself Crushed is infatuated with a friend and wants advice on what to do with “this delightful but distressing energy” (37).

Sugar advises Crushed to focus on making his marriage sexier and more exciting. She says that the fantasy of another person can be alluring because it is divorced from the drudgery of everyday marriage. However, it is like “a motorcycle with no one on it. Beautiful. Going nowhere” (38).

A single mother calling herself Oh Mama laments that her child’s father is an absent figure who merely pays lip service to caring for his child and does not contribute child support. She wonders whether she should continue updating the father on the child’s progress or cut ties with him completely.

Sugar empathizes with Oh Mama’s anger and advises her to get an attorney to ensure that the negligent father pays child support. However, she advises her to put her personal feelings aside and do her part to ensure that the child has a relationship with its father, as it is in their best interests. She should therefore craft an email to the father, in case he changes his mind. Sugar recalls that while her own father was destructive, in her earliest youth, she idolized him regardless. Her mother continued to encourage her to have a relationship with her father if she wanted, putting her own feelings on the matter aside.

Scared & Confused, a woman in her early twenties, wonders whether to continue her six-year, on-off relationship, despite her doubts. She worries that although they want different things in life, she might never find anyone better.

Sugar advises Scared & Confused to break up with her boyfriend. She recalls that when she was 20, she was constantly in tears because she was married to a man that she loved, while not being ready to only love one person. However, she had similar fears to Scared & Confused about leaving him. Sugar emphasizes that Scared & Confused is not “torn” but “only just afraid” of being alone, which “is not a good reason to stay” (51). Instead, she ought to trust herself and live out what she already knows to be true.

A 26-year-old woman called Elissa Bassist wants to write but alternates between thinking her writing is too feminine to be taken seriously and experiencing writer’s block. She wants to be a great writer and fears it will never happen, and she also wants to shrug off her current life and start a new one. She asks Sugar how she can write when she is so overwhelmed.

Sugar advises Elissa Bassist to be humble, because at present she is arrogant as well as self-loathing in the thought that she should be a great writer by the age of 26. Sugar confides that although she had won some grants and awards in her twenties, and wrote in feverish bursts, it was not until age 35 that she finished her first book and that she had to “gather everything within [her] to make it happen” (55). She says that there came a point where not writing a book was worse than writing a bad one. She also adds that all the allegedly wasted work of her twenties was essential to her final endeavor. She concludes by saying that while Elissa Bassist mentions that many female writers had depression and died by suicide, the most common feature of women writers is their ability to excel and communicate despite the prejudice leveled against them.

Dealing with Divorce is devastated that their father recently left their mother for a younger woman. They feel that they can suddenly no longer trust this former role model while simultaneously wanting the old relationship back.

Sugar says that being genuine about the hurtful impact of the father’s actions is the only way to maintain an honest relationship. Sugar reminds Dealing with Divorce that while their father was a poor husband to their mother, this does not reflect on their relationship. Instead, Dealing with Divorce got accidentally tangled in their father’s lies and had “an up-close view of an intimacy that ultimately did not include you” (62).

Odd Man Out, who is in his mid-thirties, is upset about overhearing his best college buddies bad-mouthing his character and critiquing his choice to get back together with an ex-girlfriend they disapprove of. While he confronted the friends and they apologized, he cannot let go of the feeling of betrayal. He wants Sugar’s advice as to whether he should cut these men off.

Sugar reminds Odd Man Out that everyone speaks badly about their friends behind their backs. Although his friends have unflattering opinions about his character and girlfriend, they likely still love and respect him. He should not view their discussion as a betrayal; rather, they “all got caught in an embarrassing situation that [she would] guess every last one of us can imagine being on both sides of” (68). She advises him to talk to his friends again, share his feelings of hurt, and listen to what they have to say. She adds that friendships are worth holding on to, as they will likely be present for his entire life.

A 34-year-old woman feels guilty about her sexual fantasies concerning father-daughter incest or men “taking” her aggressively (73). She wonders whether this has roots in the sexual fondling her father perpetrated on her before dying in a car crash when she was eight. She asks for Sugar’s advice on how to handle her fantasies when she has no desire to join an S&M community.

Sugar advises her that she is not alone in having these fantasies and that they are not incompatible with being a feminist. Instead, she might see being a feminist as increasing the chance of getting what she wants from sex. However, Sugar does advise her to get psychotherapy to help make sense of her father’s violation and death and the complex love she has for him. Doing some shadow work will enable her to separate what needs to be healed from her fantasies and to “finally embrace [her] sexuality and have some fun” (76).

Ruler of a Fallen Empire, a married man with four children, has an addiction to painkillers, in addition to a failing business and a lackluster marriage. He knows that if he continues on this path, the painkillers will likely kill him; however, he fears that going to rehab will bankrupt him, as he does not have health insurance, and that going to an AA meeting in his small town would ruin his reputation and business.

Sugar observes that it seems Ruler believes he is “fucked before [he] even begin[s]” (79). The painkiller addiction may be causing this despondency and making his love and business lives even more negative. She encourages him to reach out and confide in a medical doctor about his addiction to get help. She urges him to not be fearful of either spending money on rehab or attending an AA/NA meeting, as people might be compassionate to his plight, because “just about every one of us has fucked up at one point or another” (81). She also advocates that he should be honest with his wife about his addiction and gauge her reaction.