Dear Sugar. . . You Make It So Much Better!

Cheryl Strayed is one of my favorite authors.  I discovered her when I received her New York Times best seller, Wild, as a present this past Christmas.  From the first page, I was all in and couldn't stop reading and definitely didn't want her journey in Wild to end.

I was totally drawn into every aspect of her memoir and in reading Wild, came to respect the amount of introspection and hard work she put herself through to bring that compelling story out of herself.

No other writer that I know of delivers the goods about life and loss the way Strayed does.  Her writing is clean and honest, direct yet compassionate.



Cheryl Strayed

After I finished reading Wild, I went through some kind of Strayed withdrawl and had to go back and read various parts of Wild again because I really needed to feel I was in a "life is more" zone that she courageously created in Wild.

But then I found another book that Cheryl Strayed had written.  This one, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life From Dear Sugar, was written by Strayed before she wrote Wild.  Dear Sugar is an advice column that appears on the website, The Rumpus, and is not anything like Dear Abbey or any other advice column you may read.

Simply put, Dear Sugar is a million times better. 

 

But only if you are prepared for someone to give you the unvarnished truth.

Dear Sugar is a powerful book because the answers that Strayed gives to people's questions about what to do when they find themselves in troubling situations are the simple and direct truth but her guidance is also sprinkled with love and concern for the person seeking help.  Strayed takes from her own poignant and joyful life experiences and uses them as a place to begin a dialogue with the person seeking support with a problem.

It's not a "you should do this" kind of advice column but more of a "this is what happened to me, this is how I felt and this is what helped me feel better and maybe it will help you" kind of advice column.

Today I write about a letter that a young man who calls himself Bewildered wrote to Dear Sugar seeking advice on how to emotionally support his girlfriend whose mother died many years ago.  Since her mother's death, his girlfriend has moved forward to find and build a wonderful life for herself but naturally she sometimes she misses her mom and talks with him about the emotional hole left in her life because of her mother's death.  The boyfriend says he tries to empathize but "feels lame in the face of her grief" and just wants to know how he can be a better partner when it comes to handling grief.

I think that's something we all struggle with and need to know more about.  

 

Please listen below to this amazing Soundcloud link that features Cheryl Strayed reading the letter that Bewildered sent her and her amazing and insightful answer to Bewildered's timely question about handling another person's grief feelings:

http://m.soundcloud.com/audibleuk/the-black-ark-of-it-from-tiny

Wild By Cheryl Strayed

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

                     ~ Mary Oliver

                     "The Summer Day"

From the moment I started reading the first words of the New York Times bestseller, Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, I couldn't put it down.

 

It has truly been a long time since I have read a book so honest and at the same time so poignant in its telling of a compelling personal story.

 

In hiking the Pacific Crest Trail all by herself from the Mojave Desert in California to the Bridge of the Gods that crosses the Columbia River at the Oregon-Washington border, Cheryl Strayed tests herself physically, mentally and emotionally in ways that many people never do in their whole lives.  And don't ever want do.  Ever.  Talk about pain!  You will never think about hiking boots the same way after reading Wild.

 

But Cheryl Strayed is a beautiful writer and through her unfiltered descriptions of what she is feeling and thinking, she is able to grab you and take you along on her powerful journey as though you are right there with her, step by step, the whole time. 

 

As she treks along the Pacific Crest Trail, Strayed slowly finds her inner resources and becomes stronger as she sleeps outdoors, purifies her water (I could feel her thirst), dreams about Snapple lemonade, adjusts to carrying a heavy backpack for miles and miles every day through intense heat and then snowfalls, deals with rattlesnakes and black bears and sometimes just being the only girl on the trail.  As she occasionally meets fellow hikers along the way, I was amazed by the immediate trust and support that most of them felt for each other; as if there was an inner radar that told each of them who was friend and who was foe in the great outdoors.

Grief is what puts Strayed on the Pacific Crest Trail and she describes every raw emotion of it: the falling apart, the sadness, the regrets, the anger, the exhaustion, the inability to wrap your brain around reality.

Just to give you a taste of how Strayed writes, here is a short except:

"There were so many other amazing things in this world.

They opened up inside of me like a river.  Like I didn't know I could take a breath and then I breathed.  I laughed with the joy of it, and the next moment I was crying my first tears on the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail).  I cried and I cried and I cried.  I wasn't crying because I was happy.  I wasn't crying because I was sad.  I wasn't crying because of my mother or my father or Paul.  I was crying because I was full.  Of those fifty-some hard days on the trail and of the 9,760 days that had come before them too.

I was entering.  I was leaving.  California streamed behind me like a long silk veil.  I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore.  And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen.  I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too."

I don't want to give away what happens to Cheryl Strayed in her amazing book so I will not reveal the particulars of her long distance adventure in the wilderness. You must read it for yourself!