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

“I suppose you think this has nothing to do with your question, Johnny, but it has everything to do with my answer. It has everything to with every answer I have ever given to anyone. It’s Sugar’s genesis story.”

In her reply to the first problem in the book, that of a man called Johnny who claims he does not know the meaning of love, Sugar relates a story about how her mother’s dying word to her was “love.” Aware that her correspondent might think she is going off course, she addresses him conversationally, stating the importance of love to her perspective on every matter. Her insistence that it is important for Johnny to understand where she is coming from indicates that she wants to connect personally with her readers, not merely advise them from a distance. The reference to Sugar’s “genesis story” refers to the Biblical first book of Genesis and is apt, as this is the first letter that appears in her own book and sets the tone for the rest.

“You will never stop loving your daughter. You will never forget her. You will always know her name. But she will always be dead. Nobody can intervene and make that right and nobody will. Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words.”

In a series of short, sharp, emphatic statements, Sugar expresses the irretrievable nature of loss. The use of extreme negatives such as “never” and “nobody” emphasizes that there is no cure for this loss. This shows Sugar’s secular perspective and does not offer hopeful stories of an afterlife. Still, despite asserting that no words will ever make what is wrong right, Sugar’s words offer a sort of consolation in validating the woman’s grief: Despite what the word tells her, she is right to feel so bad.

“When I was done writing it, I understood that things happened just as they were meant to. That I couldn’t have written my book before I did. I simply wasn’t capable of doing so, either as a writer or a person. To get to the point I had to get to to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties. I had to write a lot of sentences that never turned into anything and stories that never miraculously formed a novel.”

Here, Sugar consoles a would-be writer in her twenties that the composition of a novel can never happen before a person is ready. The image of sentences that “never turned into anything” is analogous to the wandering experimentation that characterizes many young people’s life. However, as Sugar did eventually produce a novel, her message of delay and acceptance of delay is a hopeful one.

“The fuck is yours too, WTF. That question does not apply ‘to everything every day.’ If it does, you’re wasting your life. If it does, you’re a lazy coward, and you are not a lazy coward. Ask better questions, sweet pea. The fuck is your life. Answer it.”

In a response to a question from an apathetic youngster who does not find any meaning in life, Sugar shares the story of sexual abuse at the hands of her paternal grandfather and how she had to make sense of this to stop the trauma. She echoes WTF’s use of the expletive “fuck” to empathize with them linguistically, even as she admonishes them for their apathy and encourages them to take their life seriously. The imperative to “ask better questions, sweet pea” encapsulates Sugar’s singular combination of sweetness and toughness.

“Forgiveness forces an impossible internal face-off between you and a woman you hate. Acceptance asks only that you embrace what’s true. Strange as it sounds, I don’t think you’ve done that yet. I can hear it in the pitch of your letter. You’re so outraged and surprised that this shitty thing happened to you that there’s a piece of you that isn’t yet convinced it did. You’re looking for the explanation, the loophole, the bright twist in the dark tale that reverses its course.”

Sugar advises a woman who is reeling from her husband’s affair to focus on acceptance before forgiveness. In referring to “the pitch” of the woman’s letter, as though she is hearing her voice, Sugar intuits that the woman’s outrage has stood in the way of her coming to terms with what actually happened to her. The imagery of loopholes and twists in dark tales indicates that the woman is trying to skip over her pain to some promised land where she is recovered or the transgression never happened. Here, as in other letters, Sugar advises that such denial is not an option if true healing is to take place.

“Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far guide you onward into whatever crazy beauty awaits. Trust that all you learned during your college years was worth learning, no matter what answer you have or do not have about what use it is. Know that all those stories, poems, plays, and novels are a part of you now and that they are bigger than you and they will always be.”

Sugar uses visionary rhetoric to inspire a group of bewildered English graduates who are afraid of an uncertain future and how their degree with be relevant to it. The image of “mysterious starlight” sublimates the students’ instinct to study English, while the promise of “crazy beauty” alludes to the unexpected and irregular surprises ahead that may be better than what they initially hoped for. The notion that the literature they have read is automatically part of them aims to alleviate fears about their degree being wasted; instead, they will be invested with the promise of great words.

“To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having first been nailed to the cross.”

Sugar, a nonbeliever, finds that we should not determine our view of whether God exists by how well things are going for us personally. To do so makes us pious individualists rather than compassionate humans, a feat that incidentally echoes America’s capitalist ethos, as Sugar notes elsewhere. Instead, by focusing on the crucifixion aspect of the Easter story as much as the resurrection, we learn to find meaning in our suffering and support others in theirs. She thus urges for a focus on shared humanity as much as on the miracles that bless certain individuals.

“In your twenties you’re becoming who you’re going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole. […] You’re generally less humble in that decade than you’ll ever be and this lack of humility is oddly mixed with insecurity and uncertainty and fear. You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.”

Sugar encapsulates the combination of arrogance and insecurity that makes people in their twenties more likely to be “assholes.” Her use of this expletive adds humor and conveys the threat of becoming an immoral person acutely. While the tendency in this decade is to be selfish, Sugar encourages a counterintuitive stretching toward other people and becoming a visionary warrior not for oneself, but for love.

“You will never have my permission to close yourself off to love and give up. Never. You must do everything you can to get what you want and need, to find ‘that type of love.’ It’s there for you. I know it’s arrogant of me to say so, because what the hell do I know about looking like a monster or a beast? Not a thing. But I do know that we are here, all of us—beasts and monsters and beauties and wallflowers alike—to do the best we can. And every last one of us can do better than give up.”

While Sugar acknowledges that she knows nothing about living with a disorder that affects physical development, she relates to the man who calls himself Beast through their common humanity and emphasizes that he is as worthy of seeking out romantic love as anyone else. By echoing his framing of romantic love as “that type of love,” she emphasizes that this has been a taboo topic for him that he has almost been afraid to touch. The repetition of “never,” indicating that he should not give up on love, is a passionate prohibition that impels him to go forth on his quest.

“Go, because you want to. Because wanting to leave is enough. Get a pen. Write that last sentence on your palm—all three of you. Then read it over and over again until your tears have washed it away.”

Following a series of imperatives about why three women correspondents should leave their relationships, Sugar offers the notably simple permission to “go […] because wanting to leave is enough.” This stands in stark contrast to the women’s lengthy elaborations about why they feel guilty about wanting to leave. The second part of Strayed’s instruction, to write this on their palms and read it until the tears wash it away, is a way of forcing the women to acknowledge the emotional truth of their desire to go and the pain they have experienced in staying.

“Doing what one wants to do because one wants to do it is hard for a lot of people, but I think it’s particularly hard for women. We are, after all, the gender onto which a giant Here to Serve button has been eternally pinned. We’re expected to nurture and give by virtue of our femaleness, to consider other people’s feelings and needs before our own.”

Sugar departs from her usual individual- or humanity-focused advice to address a particular group: women. In her response to three women who want to leave relationships counter to society’s expectations, she finds that she cannot neglect the social conditioning of gender, which forces women to put others’ needs starkly before their own. By calling out this expectation, Sugar draws attention to its sexist, outdated nature. The repetition of “hard” indicates her view that women following their instincts is a counterintuitive path and one that will meet with both internal and external opposition.

“I’ve written often about how we have to reach hard in the direction of the lives we want […] trust the inner voice that speaks with love and shut out the inner voice that speaks with hate. But the thing is—the thing so many of us forget—is that those values and principles don’t only apply to our emotional lives. We’ve got to live them out in our bodies too. Yours. Mine. Droopy and ugly and fat and thin and marred and wretched as they are.”

Sugar acknowledges that the compassionate efforts we make to improve our emotional lives must also embrace our relationships with our bodies, unlovely as we may perceive them to be. Sugar’s list of adjectives at the end of the passage marks an effort to acknowledge and accept the body’s flaws. Sugar’s sense that she personally has focused abundantly on bettering people’s emotional situations, whereas she has tended to forget the body, illustrates how accepting and embracing the latter has been a struggle for her too.

“I know it’s a kick in the pants to hear that the problem is you, but it’s also fucking fantastic. You are, after all, the only person you can change.”

Although this advice applies specifically to a young woman who is haunted by her boyfriend’s sexual past, the notion that the correspondent is themselves the problem and that they can draw power from this because they can only control their own behavior is a recurring motif in Sugar’s advice. Sugar’s use of the colloquialism “kick in the pants” uses humor to soften the blow that the correspondent is in the wrong. The superlative phrase “fucking fantastic” encourages the correspondent to find joy in her ability to turn the situation around herself.

“Fucked-up people will try to tell you otherwise, but boundaries have nothing to do with whether you love someone or not. They are not judgments, punishments, or betrayals. They are a purely peaceable thing: the basic principles you identify for yourself that define the behaviors that you will tolerate from others, as well as the responses you will have to those behaviors. Boundaries teach people how to treat you, and they teach you to respect yourself.”

Sugar defines boundaries as an act of self-love or self-respect rather than something more selfish, unequivocally divorcing them from how much we love others. Sugar’s firmness on boundaries is evident, given her belief that only “fucked-up people” do not have or respect them. The idea of boundaries as a “peaceable thing” infiltrates Sugar’s advice across her columns to people who are dealing with relatives that overstep the mark.

“I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you didn’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

In her answer to a man’s inquiry about whether he should leap into the unknown and give up the life he loves to have children, Sugar offers the metaphor of an unlived “sister life” that runs alongside the one we choose. In stating that neither she nor he will know about the unchosen life, she asserts that we are all united in the human predicament of acknowledging “important and beautiful” lives that we did not live. In the metaphor of saluting that life from the shore, as though it is a passing ship, we pay respect to those unfulfilled dreams without becoming mired in regret.

“And there he/she would be, visible through the front window; lit by the lamp you once switched off and on with a casual and familiar ease. You’d see him/her for only a fleeting moment, but that image would sear itself into your brain. He/she would be laughing a little, obviously in conversation with someone maddeningly out of view. And you’d want to stop, to investigate, to watch, but you couldn’t stop because what if he/she looked out and saw you?”

This passage paints a vivid picture of the real-life accountability that came with spying on one’s ex during Sugar’s youth. She envisions the scenario of driving past the ex’s house and spying from one’s window, using the second-person singular to encourage the reader to relate to the protagonist. Details such as the lamp one used to switch on and off oneself heighten the concreteness of the experience. However, the dissatisfaction of witnessing the blurry figure of one’s ex apparently moving on with their life and of needing to leave before one got caught introduces the idea of high stakes for not moving on oneself. This is expressed stylistically; the desire to stop and watch and the need to drive on for fear of being caught are condensed into a single sentence. This contrasts with the correspondent writing about social-media stalking their ex, where there initially seem to be no consequences for such antisocial behavior.

“A lot of artists give up because it’s just too damn hard to go on making art in a culture that by and large does not support its artists. But the people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity. They’ve taken into their hearts the idea that there is enough for all of us, that success will manifest itself in different ways for different sorts of artists […] that being genuinely happy for someone who got something you hope to get makes you genuinely happy too.”

Sugar expresses that the only way a novelist who is envious of their peers’ success will be able to keep on creating is to adopt the abundant view that there is fulfillment for all kinds of artists. She acknowledges that this is counterintuitive, given the lack of cultural support for artists. However, her conversational tone, which mimics the patterns of her speech, especially in asserting that being “genuinely happy” for those who have achieved what the writer “hope[s] to get” increases one’s own happiness, conveys her passionate belief that the transformation from begrudging to generous is possible. Moreover, the idea of taking this belief into one’s heart indicates that deep trust is necessary, as opposed to intellectual reason.

“The strange and painful truth is that I’m a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you experience my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place. I’d give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things. It showed me shades and hues I couldn’t have otherwise seen.”

Sugar expresses the paradox that losing her mother young was both a curse and a gift. The colloquialism that she would give back this fate “in a snap” testifies to the pain the loss has caused her. However, directly addressing a bereaved father’s discovery of sacredness in her writing, she admits that this was in part due to facing irretrievable loss at age 22. The notion of building a temple in the place obliterated by grief refers to the creative imperative that enabled her to survive and thrive after such loss.

“It’s a long damn life, Happily Ever After. And people get mucked up in it from time to time. Even the people we marry. Even us. You don’t know what it is you’ll get mucked up in yet, but if you’re lucky, and if you and your fiancé are really right for each other, and if the two of you build a marriage that lasts a lifetime, you’re probably going to get mucked up in a few things along the way.”

Sugar addresses a young woman’s unrealistic expectations of an immaculate, infidelity-free lifelong bond by emphasizing that it’s a “long damn life,” a colloquialism whose banality is brought home by the long vowels of its monosyllables. She uses the phrase “mucked up” repeatedly to introduce the idea of the unexpected foibles that afflict every marriage. This also emphasizes Sugar’s belief that the correspondent who calls herself Happily Ever After should adjust her expectations to include things going wrong in a marriage.

“We cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. […] Our work here is the keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing by the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things.”

Sugar reemphasizes her belief that we cannot possibly know how life will turn out, especially which people will still be in our lives. This relates directly to the experience of her mother buying the toddler dress that Sugar liked from a yard sale and imploring her to “put it in a box and wait.” When the daughter that Sugar never imagined having was born and able to wear that dress long after her grandmother died, Sugar is overcome by the “ordinary miraculous” quality of that moment. The mystery of old experiences coming to bear fruit is one of the joys of life, but in the meantime, we must humbly accept that we do not know how things will turn out.

One hot afternoon during the era in which you’ve gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin, you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You’re wrong. You do.”

This passage, which features the book’s title words, refers to a point in Sugar’s life where her self-esteem was so low that she felt she did not deserve a kind gesture. Retrospectively, Sugar’s point that she did deserve such just gestures regardless indicates the importance of self-forgiveness and the power to be redeemed in a moment. The colloquialism “worthless piece of crap” refers to her self-dehumanization at this point in her life and her overwhelming sense of guilt. The use of second-person singular to address her younger self also envelopes the reader, who might have had a similar experience.

“When we’re in the presence of someone else’s pain, the burden of not-doing is so much greater than the burden of doing. Doing lifts the burden. Even if it’s a small thing. Like writing a letter.”

This passage communicates Sugar’s continuous advocation of action over inaction, even when our actions can only be as small as writing a letter in response to another’s grief. While inaction might seem like the easy option, in the end it becomes a heavier burden than doing, which changes the energy through movement and progress.

“I didn’t know exactly why I was doing what I was doing, but I knew it scared me and I had to do it. I trusted myself wildly. I hacked away at the hair that had been with me through the first half of my twenties because I felt instinctually it was the only way I’d be free.”

Sugar’s spontaneous haircut during her mid-twenties required her wild self-trust, even in the face of incomplete knowledge. The act, which represents a severing from one’s roots, stands as a metaphor for releasing herself from the ties that bound her in her early twenties and the determination to chart a new course, even if she is uncertain of what that is. Still, the instinct for freedom was paramount and the wisest choice for Sugar at this life stage.