Tiny Beautiful Things (10th Anniversary Edition): Reese's Book Club: Advice from Dear Sugar Paperback – November 1, 2022

This collection of responses from the column "Dear Sugar" has fully transformed the way I write. Whether this is a class essay, a ponteital manuscript for a book, or an amazon review; this woman changed it all. Her ability to cut straight to her point with ought mincing her words, the luxury of her identity being confidential allowing this, brought emotion and complex thought to the forefront of each letter. A few of the letters are sad, some are joyous, but the one that has captured my essence and the essence of those who have read it is the namesake of the book itself: "Tiny Beautiful Things". I have recommended this book to anyone who wants a nonfiction read that they can read short bursts, anyone who wants to learn how to write better, friends, family, classmates; I could go on for at least a page. For the sake of brevity I will end with the idea that this book is not a book to read if you don't feel like experiencing the death of the human condition from all walks of life.

A gifted writer at her mind/heart/soul best! Strayed blends honesty and insight in prose often worthy of being called poetry.

Strayed does wonders with this book. Each letter is essential and, as a whole, walk one through a very comprehensive range of emotions and situations. For me it was soothing to read during a not so easy personal time, her responses to readers always guiding me to find light and relativize my own approaches to life. She is authentic, her responses are incredibly well constructed and powerful, and in the few pages she delivers a magic to simple and not so simple topics. She doesn’t simplify anything, nor complicate anything - and that balanced viewpoint is so refreshing and utterly necessary today.

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.

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.