70 pages • 2 hours read
Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
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Themes
Advice for Individuals, Free from Identity Politics
Content Warning: This section references childhood sexual abuse.
The columns dating from Strayed’s Rumpus years (2010-2012) had anonymity built in at both correspondent and columnist level. In addition to the use of pseudonyms, identity markers—such as the correspondents’ ethnicity, social background, political affiliation, and sometimes even sexuality and gender identity—are not revealed unless relevant to the issue at hand. Notably, most correspondents reveal their age, which is relevant for contextualizing their problem and allows Sugar to contemplate where she was at a similar life stage. As for Sugar, reading across the columns, the audience could gauge that she is a cisgender heterosexual woman with working-class roots and liberal politics. The reader might also assume that she is white and does not have a disability, as she does not mention any appearance-based discrimination. However, Sugar herself identifies more by the experiences that have shaped her, including the early loss of her mother, her commitment to living her truth regardless of social expectation, and becoming a writer. She prefers to connect with correspondents through experiences like the latter rather than through identity markers.
With identity markers subordinated in favor of shared experience, Sugar addresses her correspondents as individuals rather than as members of a social group. For example, she advises M, a woman in her late thirties who is considering becoming a single mother with the aid of a sperm bank and despairs of ever having a romantic partner with whom to share the experience of parenthood, to look at her individual circumstances and desires rather than automatically classing herself in the socially marginalized category of a “single mother.” She reminds M that becoming pregnant by sperm donation does not mean closing the door on love; contrary to the partner-first, then-kids narrative promoted by a patriarchal society, she could do things in reverse. Although Sugar’s own mothering story follows the conventional narrative, she relates to M’s strong desire for motherhood, offering her the questions that she and Mr. Sugar asked prior to considering children, such as financial issues and personal freedom. By accompanying M through a projected scenario of what it will be like to have a baby on her own, via the near-universal experiences of motherhood, Sugar makes the correspondent feel less alone in her predicament. In the metaphor of advising M to “take what [she has] and stack it like a tower of teetering blocks,” Sugar advocates that M should be resourceful and optimistic about what she has and build the life she dreams of from there, rather than from the preordained “vision the (patriarchal) commission made up” (123).
In the course of writing The Rumpus column and in the decade that followed, Strayed’s advocation of the individualist’s path, and of trusting the voice within, became her trademark, especially among women, who have often felt they need to subordinate their desires in favor of other people’s. The cluster of Substack correspondence in Part 6, which was written to Sugar 10 years after The Rumpus, features a complaint from a young man who bemoans that his girlfriend left him with Sugar’s refrain of “wanting to leave is enough” from “The Truth That Lives There” in the 2012 edition of Tiny Beautiful Things (171). Thus, despite nurturing a space free from identity politics in her advice columns, Sugar’s sharing of her lived female experiences has caused her to become a feminist icon and role model, as she encouraged women to embrace the freedom available to them. This approach contrasts with that of former generations of female advice columnists, such as Jeanne Phillips, the writer behind the 20th-century Dear Abby columns, who states that “back then, people wanted to blend in” and “be the best American they could be” (Finnie, Hannah. “How the Internet Changed Advice Columns.” The Atlantic, 2015).
Sugar’s individualist attitude to her correspondents’ problems also contrasts with that of columnists from marginalized communities, such as John Paul Brammer, the writer of ¡Hola Papi!, who describes himself as a “queer Latino ‘Dear Abby’” (Rao, Sonia. “¡Hola Papi! Advice Columnist Jean Paul Brammer Is Ready to Show His True Self.” The Washington Post, 2021). He acknowledges that while labels can be limiting, “it’s just so hard to completely do away with identity, because […] in the world that we have right now, we use it for some pretty practical things. We use it to find each other, to advocate for each other, to find strength in numbers” (Rao). Thus, while Sugar, who connects the plight of gay and straight women with work-shy partners in “How the Real Work Is Done,” prefers to address the predicament rather than the identity marker, ¡Hola Papi!, whose very pseudonym derives from how prospective partners address him on dating websites, envisions that targeting advice to communities who face specific issues can be empowering. While the variation in approach could derive from Sugar’s white, heterosexual privilege as opposed to ¡Hola Papi!’s more marginal experiences, it is also a symptom of a different political climate. Where the early 2010s, when Sugar was writing for The Rumpus, were dominated by the fallout from the 2008 economic downturn, the political division of the post-2016 era has seen identity politics come to the fore. Indeed, in her post-pandemic columns, Sugar demonstrates awareness of this change, even as her brand retains the empowerment of individuals.
Radical Empathy and Shared Pain
Sugar admits that her criteria for selecting letters to answer in her column is “highly subjective: [she]’ll answer anything, so long as it interests or challenges or touches [her]” (12). While all advice columnists with a surplus of letters would choose the problems they were most drawn to, Sugar makes explicit that she picks the ones that most move her as an individual. Her wish to be challenged or touched by a correspondent’s letter indicates a desire to be transported to a place of internal truth, conflict, or pain. Steve Almond, in his introduction, indicates that this is part of her style of “radical empathy,” whereby she “ministers” to people in pain by “telling stories about her own life, the particular ways in which she’s felt thwarted and lost, and how she got found again” (6). Sugar’s concentration on the particulars of her own story flies in the face of traditional therapy or advice giving, whereby the expert is meant to keep as neutral a facade as possible in their process of helping others. Whereas the traditional therapist blends into the background, allowing the patient’s story to emerge, Sugar’s responses make her just as vivid a character as her correspondents and equally vulnerable.
Sugar’s ability to be affected is evidenced in how her correspondents’ problems get under her skin. For example, divorcé Johnny’s questions about what love is and when to declare it cause her to lose sleep in excitement, as she lies “wide awake with [her] eyes closed writing [her] answer to [him] in [her] head” (16). She confesses that she “sort of love[s] him” for his bravery in writing to her with his “searching, scared, knuckleheaded, nonchalant, withholding dudelio heart on full display” (15). Sugar’s listing of six adjectives encompasses her appreciation for the multitudes in human emotion, while her invention of the word “dudelio,” an affectionate term for macho, indicates her enthusiasm for his problem. Here, Sugar confesses to behavior that would be more fitting for a lovestruck teenager than a therapist, as she follows with the story of “love” being her mother’s dying word and her personal belief that it is the most important part of human existence. Some readers might feel that Johnny is a mere springboard for Sugar’s meditation on love and that her profound story about her mother’s teaching on the subject eclipses Johnny’s fear of commitment post-divorce. Still, her passion for Johnny’s inquiry exudes a warmth that, based on other reader responses, would likely make him feel seen and appreciated.
In other letters that address more urgent problems, such as the one from Abbie about her six-month-old baby with a life-threatening brain tumor, Sugar plays a more supportive role, answering Abbie’s wish for prayers to a God Sugar does not believe in, with the promise that she is thinking about her “nonstop” and sending “blessings” (140). Here, Sugar offers immediate comfort and refrains from sharing her own story until Abbie writes back with the news that her daughter is out of danger and her meditations turn more toward the existence of God and whether He kept her safe. This is when a shift in Sugar’s empathy occurs, and she reveals her thoughts as a nonbeliever who is unqualified to answer Abbie’s questions and yet is “unable to get [her] letter out of [her] head” (142). She at first empathizes with Abbie, noting that “it’s perfectly natural that [she would] feel angry and scared and betrayed by a God [she] want[s] to believe will take mercy on [her] by protecting those dearest to [her]” (144), and shares that, despite her nonbelief, she too felt wronged by God when she learned of her mother’s impending premature death. Then she moves to teach Abbie a lesson, as she shares that the process of being removed (or not) from threatening situations is an arbitrary one, and that one cannot base faith on the whims of individual luck. Instead, people would do better to focus on human compassion and the miracle that occurs when they carry each other through difficult situations. Sugar draws attention to all the well-wishing emails Abbie received when her baby was in danger to point out that Abbie was “held afloat by the human love that was given to [her] when [she] most needed it” and that this latter force would not have failed her even in the event of her baby’s death (145). Here, Sugar also alludes to the importance of her work as an advice columnist who accompanies people through their tribulations.
Sugar’s brand of radical empathy also addresses the topic of shame, as she shares her most socially deplorable actions to make people feel less alone or judge others less harshly. For example, she tells a young woman who is questioning whether to have her sister and brother-in-law in her wedding because they have cheated on each other that both she and Mr. Sugar have cheated in the past (Mr. Sugar in their relationship, and Sugar in her previous marriage). In addition to pointing out how common cheating is in long-term relationships, she attempts to humanize cheaters, whom the young woman is othering and condemning, by stating that “most people don’t cheat because they’re cheaters. They cheat because they are people […] driven by hunger or for the experience of someone being hungry once more for them” (296). Here, the emphasis on the fact that cheaters are people driven by human needs who find themselves in situations that take “an unexpected turn” (296) forces the correspondent to empathize with the people she is judging on an emotional level and thereby not seek to make the distinctions between herself and them so stark. This is part of Sugar’s larger project of encouraging people to seek more connection and compassion.
The Literary Value of the Advice Column
Strayed’s experience as a writer of memoir and fiction is an important part of her approach to Dear Sugar. Almond recruited Strayed to become Sugar owing to her writing style in her first novel, Torch (2005), which features the autobiographical story of a mother’s premature cancer death and the ensuing family fallout, and a nonfiction essay that was “a searing recollection of infidelity and mourning” (3). Strayed’s literary credentials made her a good fit for The Rumpus, an online literary website that prides itself on experimental writing, and ensured that storytelling would be a crucial aspect of her correspondents’ letters and her replies to them. Almond argues that through sharing her stories, Strayed “is able to transmute the raw material of the self-help aisle into genuine literature” (6).
The term “literature” implies aesthetic craft and an element of the escapist enjoyment of being told a story, in addition to getting life insights. Strayed’s use of imagery and metaphor and her visionary motivational speeches ensure that her letters address not only the correspondent and those who are experiencing something similar but anyone who is looking to be moved or inspired. Her register varies from the lyrical to the colloquially visceral, as she is capable of evoking both the “mysterious starlight” that guides a young person to study literature and the image of her aged grandfather’s penis, which she likens to an ailing baby bird that she had to kill or else “the ghost of that old man’s cock would always be in [her] hands” (130; 91). Her marriage of idiom with the language of poetry speaks to her literary-minded audience, who want both to have their expertise acknowledged and to commune with someone raw and relatable. Indeed, the correspondents often match Strayed’s honest lyricism in effusive letters that combine patterns of speech with sophisticated language. For example, Elissa Bassist, the aspiring 20-something writer, knows the power of a stark opening, beginning with the statement: “I write like a girl” (53). She then goes on to be consciously self-depreciating with the line: “I write about my lady life experiences, and that usually comes out as unfiltered emotion, unrequited love, and eventual discussion of my vagina as metaphor” (53). Elissa Bassist’s combination of humor and emphatic statements ensure that she gets noticed, especially as Sugar admits that she is more drawn to well-written letters, even though her main criteria for choosing is emotional engagement.
Literature relies upon vivid characters and settings to truly come alive for the reader, and the Dear Sugar column is no exception to this rule. Occasionally correspondents paint compelling portraits of the characters they become involved with, as with C in “A Glorious Something Else,” who describes how an abusive elder brother “killed [her] pet rat by cutting her neck and stomach open, then put her on [C’s] pillow” (223). The contrast of the rat’s viscera with the intimacy of C’s pillow fully conveys the brother’s premeditated cruelty and makes him a tangible character in the reader’s mind. However, for the most part, the anonymity of the Dear Sugar column means that correspondents’ characters are vaguely sketched, described only by their actions. Sugar often compensates for this in her replies, by delivering a strong sense of herself as the protagonist of her own stories with a memorable supporting cast. This is especially striking in the response to Stuck, the woman who is haunted by her potential responsibility for a miscarriage at six months, when Sugar relays the story of volunteering to help a group of middle-school girls find hope. Sugar individualizes the girls, using a mixture of sensationalism and compassion. For example, there is the “truly beautiful” girl who resembles “a young Elizabeth Taylor without the curvy hips” (25). After concretely relaying the girl’s striking appearance, Sugar drops the fact that at just 13 “she’d already fucked five guys and blown ten” and had lost her virginity at age 11 to her mother’s ex-boyfriend (25). However, despite these astonishing statistics, the girl’s youthful vulnerability is made clear when she cries endlessly at the prospect of a gynecological examination “with such sharp fear and pain that it was like someone had walked into the room and pressed a hot iron against her gorgeous ass” (25). This latter sentence objectifies the girl’s beauty while also portraying the human depths of her pain and alluding to the fact that she is too young for the experiences she is having. There is no doubt that Sugar’s introduction of such third characters to her narratives is a detour away from the correspondents’ problems; however, it is also a different prism through which to view their experiences and promotes her mission of radical empathy. It is as though she advocates that correspondents see themselves in these third characters and draw inspiration from their example.
Ultimately, Sugar’s deployment of literary techniques is in the service of empathy: getting people to feel together and acknowledge each other’s humanity. Thus, while readers may peruse the columns to be in the presence of storytelling and literature, they also do so to keep the company of other humans: Sugar, her correspondents, and the people who populate the worlds of each. This is especially the case when loneliness is on the rise and there is pressure from social-media outlets to be the idealized rather than real version of oneself. Sugar’s columns provide relief from the latter, as they display people at their most vulnerable and flawed and let them know they are not alone in their imperfections.
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