Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Steve Almond, a writer, the original Sugar, and Strayed’s cohost on the Dear Sugars podcast from 2014 to 2018, was born in 1966 in California. His own writing incorporates fiction and nonfiction and includes the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (2004) and Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto (2014).

Although Almond, the original Sugar, envisioned just the sort of “irreverent and brutally honest” column that would come to be, he fired himself from writing it because he saw that his responses were more witty than heartfelt (3). Nevertheless, having the idea for the sort of woman that Sugar was, he was quickly able to identify her in Strayed, who had already written him a letter admiring the column. As he watched Strayed’s Sugar become a success, Almond learned to appreciate how advice columns were not just entertainment or a showcase for good writing but could profoundly improve people’s lives. Thus, when the opportunity to form a podcast with Strayed arose in 2014, Almond jumped at the chance to be her cohost and offer a different perspective on people’s troubles. Like Strayed, Almond has a literary background and advises the ailing to seek the solace of literature.

Bobbi Lambrecht (1945-1991) was Strayed’s mother. Although her dream was to go to college, she did not manage this until the final years of her life owing to poverty, a troubled first marriage to Strayed’s father, and the need to care for her three young children. Lambrecht worked as a waitress for most of her life and died of cancer at 45. While her death had a profound impact on Strayed’s life, her life was an important example for the kind of person Strayed wanted to be. Despite her personal difficulties, Lambrecht had a generous, wise spirit and was always looking to encourage Strayed. Strayed’s emphasis on magnanimity stems from the “obliterated place” inside that bears her mother’s loss (282). She feels that it is her responsibility, and that of anyone else who has felt such a loss, to build something beautiful from that obliterated place and be the kind of person the deceased will not get the chance to become.

In addition to being an inspiration, Lambrecht’s premature death comes as a warning to not withhold love and gratitude from those around us, as we can never be sure of how long we will have them for. This is the case with the gift of a coat that Lambrecht makes to Strayed a few months before her death, for which Strayed was ungrateful owing to its style. Strayed writes starkly in the second person, imparting the universal lesson that “you will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life” (354).

Strayed adored and idolized her father during her early youth and longed for his visits despite the violence and upheaval he brought to her household; however, she became mostly estranged from him, from the age of six, when her parents divorced. After this, her father appeared in her life at intervals, mostly to recite diatribes against her and her mother, while he made a new family with another woman. Although, in her adulthood, Strayed and her father made several efforts to get back in touch, she felt that no real relationship was possible because he would not acknowledge his role in their past. When her father died, Strayed felt unable to properly grieve this destructive man and experienced secondary grief over this fact.

Strayed’s father emerges in the Dear Sugar columns whenever a correspondent has difficulty maintaining boundaries with an abusive relative and is wondering whether to cut someone out of their lives completely. Strayed for the most part maintains that self-preservation is the most important aspect of dealing with someone abusive and that it is better to sacrifice the relationship rather than oneself. She thus encourages readers to follow her example in daring to defy a patriarchal structure that insists on honoring one’s parents regardless of the personal cost.

In 1998, just before she turned 20, Strayed married her first husband, Marco Littig. She would divorce him in 1995, after her heroin addiction, infidelity, and bereavement would render her unable to ignore the internal voice that demanded she leave the relationship. Strayed acknowledges that her first husband is a good man and shares many traits with her second husband, such as left-leaning politics and a passion for books, cats, and the outdoors. This made it difficult to have “a clean break” with him, so she made it “dirty” by cheating and falling into heroin addiction so that he would have no choice but to leave her (172). She adds that “divorcing him is the most excruciating decision [she’s] ever made” and “the wisest one too” (173). While Strayed remains haunted by the damage she inflicted on Littig, she also says that her freedom was worth the price, especially as he was resentful of her talent as a writer.

The ghost of the first husband emerges in the Sugar column every time a woman wants to leave a partner who seems perfect for her on paper. Strayed advises the women to go sooner rather than later, before they cause more unnecessary destruction to themselves and their partner. She thus wants to safeguard both parties from experiencing the hurt that she inflicted in delaying the end of her first marriage.