Tiny Beautiful Things (10th Anniversary Edition): Reese's Book Club: Advice from Dear Sugar

Wish I had known about Dear Sugar and her column sooner. I enjoyed this book so much I want more. More looks into the truths about some peoples lives. More advice from Sugar. There are bits and pieces of several stories I can relate to and other stories which helped me see others in a different, more understanding perspective, on things they have lived through. Its straight forward, in your face advice on life. The letter from the woman who lost her baby and the man who lost his son, heartbreaking, raw to the bone grief and Sugars advice is worth more than 100 therapy sessions. The advice is also for those of us going through our own grief and for those of us who have !oved ones who are as well. My brother and sister in-law went through several miscarriages together. They have NEVER had a successful pregnancy. This read shed new light on what feelings and grief they may be still carrying. It's been years since then and I hadn't thought about their miscarriages in a long time, till I read this book. But I bet if I asked them, they would probably say they thought of the day's in each year after that have gone by, maybe marking the days their son or daughter would have been born, gone to school, graduated. The book made me think how I interact with my two co-workers, who both lost their 20 year old sons in the past few years. I made an effort to bring up their sons in conversation, to give time and recognize I remember. I am blessed to have had my eyes opened more, so I can be a better person when interacting with them. I can be a better person with all my interactions, because this book helps me realize that YES everyone of us has stories or feelings we really don't want others to know, we don't talk about, feelings that can eat at us every day if we don't keep them from crawling up from where we stuffed them. This book solidifies we are all just trying to live life to the best that we can, in all its woes and glory and while we're here, we should love and care more for ourselves, and for each other, because none of us gets by unscathed.

A marvelous book, Tiny Beautiful Things reminded me of the prevalence of human suffering and the part we can play in easing one another's burdens. Based on an advice column, Dear Sugar, it’s filled with letters to Sugar asking for advice on love, heartache, disappointment, and suffering. From cancer to adultery and death to Christmas, Sugar responds with tough, shrewd compassion. She doesn’t candy coat her responses or pull any punches. And yet…and yet, no one who reads them could dispute her genuine concern and compassion for her advice seekers. She calls them “sweet pea,” and signs her letters, “Yours, Sugar.” Cheryl Strayed knows the power of story, and in most of her messages, she includes a story about herself or someone she knows. And the writing is soooo good! In one column, she quotes Italian writer Carlo Levi who said, “The future has an ancient heart,” and while I was pondering what that meant, Strayed wrote, “…that who we become is born of what we most primitively are; that we both know and cannot possibly know what it is we’ve yet to make manifest in our lives.” Every page is filled with sound advice written in a no-nonsense manner that forces the reader sit up and take notice. There’s humor. But mostly there’s support and insight. Of all the chapters, the most heartrending is “The Obliterated Place.” Strayed responds to "Living Dead Dad" in the aforementioned piece with, "I don't know how you go on without your son. I only know that you do. And you have. And you will.Your shattering sorrow light of a letter is proof of that." Read it. Read them all. Advice from Cheryl: Every last one of us can do better than give up.

I enjoy the stories Sugar shared during her advice columns. She was so raw and authentic and shared some very deep and personal experiences and traumas. It both broke my heart and brought me smiles. The advice request from the father who lost his son due to a drunk driver broke my heart and her advice brought tears to my eyes. Cheryl is incredible empathetic and knows how to write so beautifully.

This is my first review ever, so this will be like a story, if I may write my review like a story. Honest and raw. It was a sheer coincidence that I saw this book while browsing in the infamous book store Powell's, in Portland, Oregon. I was visiting from California. I was traveling with a broken soul. I was traveling with a big bag of grief on my back. I didn't know what to do with this bag, some days it felt light, others felt like I was carry a dead body. I never carried a dead body before; I didn't know how to get rid of it. I was never taught how to; nor was I taught what to do with love, first love, real love, true love, love. Experiencing love and grief for the first time, I find are two very similar feelings: you're never really prepared, meaning you don't know how to deal with either, they both can cause you confusion and disorganization, you experience emotions you never thought you would or could feel, and it feels like it will always stay with you. There's no such thing as closure. So there I was in Powell's carrying my big bag of grief, not sure what I was looking for, but I was looking. The bright red cover attracted my attention. I never heard of Cheryl Strayed before and I'm glad I didn't. If "Tiny beautiful things" wasn't my first exposure to her work, things may have been different. I began my journey of learning, acceptance, and realization. Cheryl's book was the lesson I was looking for. Actually, everyone else's grief story was my lesson. I learned that it was okay for me to feel this way, that going through it, is the moving on process. I wanted to scream on the top of my lungs and tell everyone to read this book. So I began telling, but no one heard of it, until I was in New York. When I met another creative individual, at 2:30am we exchanged our love and lost story. As I began to ask if she read "Tiny..", she completed my sentence and screamed YES! Then I screamed YES! It was an instant bonding moment. We bonded over grief! We chatted for a few more hours and exchanged contacts. About a month later, I contacted her and express how happy I was to have met her. She felt the same and then she shared with me another book that helped her. A book I never heard of, but another book with a lesson that no one really teaches you. We are in the self-taught era, let's go with it. Not learning is the biggest sin. To wrap it up, this book gave me a lesson, this lesson brought me a friend, a friend whom past me onto another lesson. "Tiny.." helped me unload. My bag of grief is much lighter now... Thank you.

I have to confess that I am constitutionally incapable of restraining myself from reading advice columns whenever I encounter them (which, given the ever-diminishing presence of print journalism in my life, has not been often of late). I am unable to avoid reading the damn things the same way that I am unable to stop myself from glancing over at the wreckage when I finally reach the scene of the accident that has caused me to spend the last hour of my life stuck in a hellish traffic jam. I always read the letters, formulate my own response in my head, and then compare notes with the advice-giver, and then either silently congratulate the adviser on her perspicacity if she agrees with me, or smugly pity her for her ignorance if she does not. This book came, then, as quite a shock to me, because Ms. Strayed's responses rarely agreed with the one I had prepared, and I found myself kicking myself for failing to come up with her answer, which was invariable straightforward, simple and profound in the way that only simple straightforward answers to knotty problems can be. This is a collection of advice columns Cheryl Strayed wrote under the pseudonym 'Sugar' for an online literary community called The Rumpus, and in it she has managed to revitalize the tired old advice-for-the-perplexed schtick by breaking one of the cardinal rules of the genre: Thou shalt keep thy private life and troubles out of thy column. As a striking example, consider her answer to 'WTF': Dear Sugar, WTF, WTF, WTF? I’m asking this question as it applies to everything every day. 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. You see what I mean? You now know more about Cheryl Strayed as a human being than you would know about Abigail Van Buren after a lifetime of reading her columns. And, the advice is both excellent because true and true because excavated from the scary place in the dark rooms of the mind where such truths live. This is a transformative book; this is a book to be treasured and referred to like an oracle - the I Ching, say, for a late post-industrial capitalist world inhabited by armies of the ethically befuddled and morally perplexed. Read it through once, certainly; but then, keep it close at hand and dip into it for a nice bracing cup of in-your-face honest-to-God truth-saying. Highly recommended to adults of all ages.

I've been reading advise columns since "Dear Abby" and "Ann Landers" were around giving out advise to the love-lorn and life-torn who depended on the two dear ladies' vast reservoir of wisdom. "Ann" and "Abby" were twins in real life, who, while dispensing advise to others, were having trouble keeping their own houses in order. Almost everyone, in Chicago at least, knew "Eppie/Ann" and "Popo/Abby" had been feuding for years and that "Eppie's" husband had left her after 30 or so years of marriage for the dreaded "younger woman". Who can forget "Ann's" column lamenting the end of her marriage to Jules, and leaving the column with dead space at the end of it to symbolise the marriage that just didn't make it? No one, I'm telling you, no one! That was one "Ann Landers" column that will live on in the hearts and minds of all who read it! And the reason that I am mentioning that particular column was that aside from "Jules and me", the average reader really didn't know anything about "Ann Landers" or "Dear Abby" and their private lives, at least from reading their columns. What we did know about the two was gleaned from Chicago-gossip by people who knew them, like my grandparents who lived in the apartment next door to Eppie and Jules. And also from stray mentions in Chicago newspapers, who may have wanted to "gin up" the rivalry between the dueling twins/dueling columns. After the twins left the advise business, due to death and senility, similar advise columns continued with the clear line maintained between advise-seeker and advise-giver. That seemed to make sense; if I had ever written for advise about my problems, I really wouldn't care to know about the problems of the lady at the other end of my letter. I obviously had enough problems of my own and couldn't take on anyone else's. But in later years this business model of anonymous advise-giver giving advise to anonymous troubled-person seemed to have been completely upended. Now people turn to Dan Savage, "Cary Tennis, the guy from "Salon", and Cheryl Strayed, all of whom dispense their own life experiences and problems along with their answers to their readers. I don't know if that's supposed to make the advise-seeker feel better, "Jeez, what is my paltry problem against Cary's life-long problems?" And the thing is that all these new advisers actually give out pretty good advise; the reader usually just has to search between weeds of other's troubles to find solutions to their own. I assume that by now a troubled person seeking help knows that's how advise is dispensed. Cheryl Strayed, the advise columnist for "The Rumpus" writing under the pseudonym "Sugar", has published a book, in trade paper, of some of her best questions/answers. The book is called "Tiny Beautiful Things" and is quite an enjoyable read. I enjoyed learning more (possibly than I really wanted to know) about "Sugar"/Cheryl's life as she answered her readers' often anguished cries for help about the problems in their lives. Marital discord, parent/child disharmony, career problems were just a few of the issues that Cheryl addressed in her replies. But, all too often, the answers and advise she gave were hidden in the weeds of her own life issues. I mean, the poor guy who was congenitally ugly and wanted to know if he'd ever have a love life, had to wade through pages about Cheryl's friend who was badly burned in an accident and his problems to find something for HIMSELF. And the confused girl who didn't know if she should stay with the guy she loved or leave him and find herself elsewhere, had to read about Cheryl and her personal search for happiness after marrying her first husband before finally hitting the nugget of truth, "yes, you should leave and find yourself". But the reason the book was enjoyable to me was that I was NOT reading the book to receive any advise. It didn't bother ME that the people who did write to her for advise had to search for it in her answers. I was really a disinterested outsider with my own problems that are not the same as "Sugar"/Cheryl was addressing. So the question I asked in the title of my review - "Do I review the book or the advise" - is a problem. I finally decided to give it a 4 star rating; a median of 5 stars for the book and 3 stars for the advise structure. The bottom line is that at age 61, I'm probably too old to completely get with the new form of advise giving. Give me "Ann" and "Abby" any day.

I first bought (and read) Tiny Beautiful Things when I was at a low point in my life. Two days before, I found out that the company I loved working for and the job that I was flourishing at were closing. I spent two days in bed crying and finally picked up my kindle to distract my mind. I had never read or heard of Dear Sugar or Cheryl Strayed (before Wild at least). I read it through twice without putting the book down. I laughed, I cried, I found something that resonated in parts of me that had gone cold. I can't even start to tell you how much this book meant and continues to mean to me. Through the worst times of my life, I constantly turn back to this book. Sugar is sweet, nonjudgmental, understanding, and most of all, not afraid to tell it like it is. She's the best friend I wish I had in my ear to help me through some of the trials of life. The book is such a wonderful combination of advice, memoir, humor, and tell it like it is advice. It's hilarious, sad, and most of all honest. You can tell she's spent hours mulling over every piece of advice that she gives. It's cut through the bulls*** honest. It's what so many young adults (and many others) need to hear. I've bought this book for so many people since. It's that book that you know will touch people. I would recommend this from the top of the tallest building in the world. If you're debating reading this, just stop. Stop and go read it now. It's a quick and moving read. Just do it, you won't regret it.

I just read this incredibly good book -- an advice book. It's from Cheryl Strayed called Tiny Beautiful Things-advice on love and life from Dear Sugar. Dear Sugar was an online advice column. And this woman has some seriously great advice. Compelling and thought provoking. From almost every life and love situation you could think of, she has excellent, brutal and honest advice. I bawled my eyes out at some of the letters that people wrote in. I reveled in the knowledge that I am NOT THE ONLY ONE who feels the way I do. I learned that all we really want is to love and be loved for who we are and that sometimes good things come to an end, just because of no other reason than it's just the end. End of friendships, love, and life. And I've learned that's it is okay to not know who you are, that it is a lifetime of learning about yourself and the relationships around you. I found it in my Amazon Kindle list, and paid $8 for it after I read the free sample. I finished it in 2 days and cried when I came to the end. I cried not just because of the end, but for all the pain anyone who was ever brave enough to write in, bare a piece of their heart, and probably heal a little for doing so. I cried because of all the pain and agony Cheryl went through as a person -- and how we are all just like her in ways. I cried for my own pain and the pain of my loved ones. And then I just cried because it felt good to do so. We've all made mistakes and probably will continue to do so. That's life. Promising no mistakes will be made is lying to yourself, and setting yourself up to break that promise. It confirmed that there aren't two sides to a story -- there is a third. The un-attached, non emotionally committed side. It's given me a renewed perspective on situations. I always believed that I liked to see "both sides" of a story, and then come up with my own version -- the third version -- and this was affirmation that it is just that .. another side, another opinion. I learned that ultimately we just want to love and be loved and that is all. That is okay. It's important to forgive ourselves for things we should no longer worry about but do anyway. And that we need to accept ourselves for where we are, and where others are. Love, Accept, Forgive.

Okay, maybe I've just read this at exactly the right time in my life, but I simply loved reading this book. And it's not just Sugar's advice that's great. I guess I found it comforting that there are so many people in the world who find themselves not knowing what to do. Cheryl Strayed as Sugar doesn't tell them what to do - at least not always - but what she manages to do is ask the reader to try a different perspective. In theory I've come across this approach on various occasions, Strayed just manages to make it much more specific and practical. If you ever found yourself wondering whether you were the only one with a certain problem: Read this book! Like PostSecret finding out about other people's secrets and concerns made me feel less alone.

ho pianto (cosa che non mi era mai capitata leggendo un libro) e mi ha emozionato tantissimo. Cheryl Strayed scrive molto bene secondo il mio parere personale, consiglierei questo libro (ho poi letto anche gli altri suoi e visto il film Wild, mi sono tutti piaciuti molto, anche il film). Una bella scoperta

Where do I start? I thought about all that I want to say. And then decided to just say, thank you. The vulnerability and wisdom shared in this book is life changing. Every story and every response made me reflect on my life, my perspective and where I constricted in life and where I needed to breathe in and then where to exhale and let go. Beautiful, raw and funny and sad.

Estou terminando de ler o livro na mesma semana em que completei 40 anos. Ele é maravilhoso.

Un poco pesado de leer pero en general tiene muy buenos mensajes y consejos