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4.23 AVERAGE
4.23 AVERAGE
Brave, beautiful and brilliant. What a wise and generous person Cheryl Strayed is. This is a precious book, I have recommended it to so many people. I would give this book 10 stars if I could. This book makes me feel like reaching into the skies to give them.
not my favorite; i found it repetitive and difficult to finish.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and how Sugar approached giving advice.
I love advice columns. I love the whole concept of them, the placing of your confusion and entanglement into the hands of a kind, sensible stranger who can step back, look at what they're holding, and tell you the shape of it. Cheryl Strayed's column Dear Sugar, published at The Rumpus a few years back, is one of the undisputed classics of the genre. I've read Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of some of those columns, before, but I come back to it every few years because Strayed takes people so seriously that it makes me want to cry. She makes their interactions a two-way street: not just some lost soul asking for help, but a conversation in which Strayed shares moments of vulnerability, or of epiphany, in her own life. It helps that she writes with lyrical grace that never falls into the trap of being self-satisfied, and it helps that she has had, by anyone's standards, a life both tough as hell and outstandingly lucky. She knows whereof she speaks. I used to have a mug that said "Write like a motherfucker" on it, which is a quote from a Dear Sugar column (and to be honest with you, I want that mug back; I'll buy another someday soon). But my favourite letter is from a man whose son was killed by a drunk driver several years ago, and who is struggling mightily to carry on. It's a long letter, and the response is long too, but the final three sentences make me weep every time I read them - whether I'm in public or not, whether I'm feeling particularly sad that day or not. I think you, whoever you are, owe it to yourself to get hold of a copy of this book somehow and read them too.*
*Okay, okay: there's a link to that column online here. Read it, and then buy the book.
Originally published on my blog, Elle Thinks.
*Okay, okay: there's a link to that column online here. Read it, and then buy the book.
Originally published on my blog, Elle Thinks.
*cries* *breathes* *cries some more*
This book is utterly, utterly wonderful: humane, generous, I even want to say "buoyant". It breaks your heart and puts your chin up. Everyone on the planet could probably benefit from reading it, which is not something I have ever, ever thought I would say, ever, in a million years, about any book--but if it is true of any book, it is true of this one.
This book is utterly, utterly wonderful: humane, generous, I even want to say "buoyant". It breaks your heart and puts your chin up. Everyone on the planet could probably benefit from reading it, which is not something I have ever, ever thought I would say, ever, in a million years, about any book--but if it is true of any book, it is true of this one.
One of the rare cases where the show is better than the book! oop
I stumbled on the blog these were collected from and preferred to read them in print form--always glad that while there seems to be no end to the problems people have (and dig their way into), the cruel things they do to each other, there are wise and humane voices to try and guide them out of it.
I never thought I'd like a book of advice columns so much.
I love Cheryl's writing, and this book is no exception. It is easy to read yet full of words deep in meaning and contemplation. Out of her "Dear Sugar" columns included in the book, my favorite was "Waiting By the Phone", as it perfectly encapsulated those teenage feelings of angst that one goes through after a break up that are painful, yet necessary. My heart ached and related also when I read "Like an Iron Bell", the first column featured, as her discussion about her mother dying alone ("I wasn't with my mom when she died. No one was. She died alone in a hospital room, and for so many years it felt like three-quarters of my insides were frozen solid because of that. I ran it over and over in my mind, the series of events and choices that kept me from being beside my mom in her last hours, but thinking about it didn't do a thing. Thinking about it was a long dive into a bucket of shit that didn't have a bottom") resurrected a lot of my feelings about my mother's own death (and life) during the pandemic.