Tiny Beautiful Things

From March 2010, an unpaid and unnamed columnist called Sugar answered letters at the online literary magazine The Rumpus. She was Cheryl Strayed, and the column became something no advice column had been before: an answer to a stranger's worst week that was also an essay, and usually a confession.

Tiny Beautiful Things collects those columns. People write about a dead child, a marriage they are wrecking, an affair, a father who will not speak to them, a book they cannot finish. Strayed answers by telling them what happened to her — the mother she lost at twenty-two, the heroin, the divorce — and the answer arrives sideways, in lines that have long since escaped the book: "Write like a motherfucker." "Be brave enough to break your own heart."

Part essay collection, part memoir in fragments, published by Vintage in July 2012 and later adapted for the stage and for television.