The Tiny Beautiful Things author revisits her advice column in a television series
BY LUCY FELDMAN/ PORTLAND, ORE.
ON THE EDGE OF WALLACE PARK IN PORTLAND, Ore., there is an unremarkable house with a camellia shrub out front. The house is painted a bluish gray now, but it might have been another color before. Cheryl Strayed is standing on the sidewalk in the rain with a smile on her face, conjuring a memory. This is where she took part in a yard sale in 1995, immediately after she—now quite famously—completed a 1,100-mile solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. At the time, she was a 27-year-old aspiring writer with 20¢ to her name. She sold whatever she could, including a pencil sharpener to a man who rode in on a bicycle. The man invited her to dinner with some friends, and later that night, Strayed met the person she would marry.
Strayed sees them everywhere: little signs, small reminders. It’s one of the things that define her writing, that ability to draw connections—whether between a yard sale and the life she’s built with her husband, or between a cry for help from a reader and a lesson she’s learned from her own past.
Strayed, 54, has built a career on her dual abilities to tell the whole, ugly truth about herself and to empathize with others, creating a space for self-acceptance. Wild, the 2012 memoir of her Pacific Crest Trail journey, told the story of the sudden loss of her mother to lung cancer when Strayed was 22; her subsequent struggles, including a heroin habit and a divorce; and the hike that brought her back to herself. That book, which was adapted into a 2014 film starring Reese Witherspoon, has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide. It also launched Strayed’s “accidental” career as a public speaker, for which she has traveled the world teaching writing and speaking to people about the great dreams and traumas of their lives, offering whatever wisdom and encouragement she can.
It was a fitting shift. Before Wild made her a household name, Strayed was going by another one: Sugar. In 2010, two years before Wild shot her to literary stardom, Strayed took over the advice column “Dear Sugar” for the online literary magazine the Rumpus. It was a no-pay job answering reader letters in the voice of a woman with a checkered history first dreamed up by the writer Steve Almond, and he was ready to pass the mantle. For two years, as Sugar, Strayed anonymously responded to letters seeking advice on everything from whether to have children to how to overcome jealousy. Instead of offering the practical guidance given
