Product Description
REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK • An anniversary edition of the bestselling collection of "Dear Sugar" advice columns written by the author of #1 New York Times bestseller Wild—featuring a new preface and six additional columns. Soon to be a Hulu Original series.
For more than a decade, thousands of people have sought advice from Dear Sugar—the pseudonym of bestselling author Cheryl Strayed—first through her online column at The Rumpus, later through her hit podcast, Dear Sugars, and now through her popular Substack newsletter. Tiny Beautiful Things collects the best of Dear Sugar in one volume, bringing her wisdom to many more readers. This tenth-anniversary edition features six new columns and a new preface by Strayed. Rich with humor, insight, compassion—and absolute honesty—this book is a balm for everything life throws our way.
Review
“Charming, idiosyncratic, luminous, profane. . . . Sugar is the ultimate advice columnist for the internet age. . . . She shines out amid the sea of fakeness.” —The New Republic
“Revolutionary. . . . In Strayed’s hands, the advice column [is] a radical therapeutic experience. . . . like downing a cup of ayahuasca. . . Strayed would transform your existential problem into swooning, bespoke essays that exposed as much of the advice-giver as they did of the petitioner. . . . [She] has steadily opened up a new vocabulary for how we express ourselves, personally and politically." —The New Yorker
“Destined to become a classic of the form.” —Aimee Bender
“These pieces are nothing short of dynamite.” —Salon
About the Author
Cheryl Strayed is the author of the number-one New York Times bestseller Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which has sold more than four million copies worldwide and was made into an Oscar-nominated major motion picture. Tiny Beautiful Things was adapted as a play that has been staged in theaters across the country and as a Hulu television series airing in 2023. Cheryl is also the author of Brave Enough, which brings together more than one hundred of her inspiring quotes, and the debut novel Torch. She has hosted two hit podcasts, Sugar Calling and Dear Sugars. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PREFACE TO THE VINTAGE BOOKS
TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION (2022)
I’ve long believed literature’s greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone. Across generations, cultures, classes, races, genders, and every other divide, stories and sentences
can make us think, Oh yes, me too. That is precisely how it feels to love and lose and triumph and try again. The only thing I ever hope to do as a writer is to make people feel less alone, to make them feel more human, to make them feel what I have felt so many times as a reader: stories have the power to save us by illuminating the most profoundly beautiful and terrible things about our existence.
That I’ve had the opportunity to do so very directly in my work as Dear Sugar was a lucky surprise. When I took on the unpaid gig of writing the column anonymously for The Rumpus in early 2010, I’d recently completed the first draft of my second book, Wild. I said yes to writing the
Dear Sugar column because I thought it would be fun. It didn’t take long to see I’d been wrong. It was fun, but also so much more than that. This work that began as a lark quickly took on real meaning. It became something I gave everything to.
And, eventually, it also became a book—which, over this past decade, has inspired a podcast, a play, and a television show, as well as this expanded tenth-anniversary edition that includes six new columns.
All along the way I’ve never forgotten that none of it would’ve been possible without all the people who wrote to me. In an age when there is much discussion about the disconnection that comes from the Internet, the pandemic, the fallout of too much of life lived on screens, Dear Sugar
has always been, quite simply, about one perso
