On one hand, you think, “Yeah me, too, I can really relate to that.

I think there is something pleasurable about reading about other people’s problems. If there was a newspaper sitting there and it had Dear Abby or Ann Landers in it, I was going to read it.

Q Were you a fan of advice columns before this?īefore I became Sugar, I wouldn’t say I followed any particular advice column. It became this thing that was bigger and different than I thought it would be. I was using stories from my own life to illuminate other people’s lives and other people’s problems. So, (my responses) became these big essays on life. I (brought) the force of everything I knew as a human and as a writer into answering these questions. The play finds Strayed at home with her laptop and in Sugar mode, responding to a revolving chorus of letter writers seeking advice for dealing with infidelities, coming out, bad parents, the death of a child, the meaning of life. It’s currently at San Francisco Playhouse through March 7 - and Strayed was in the audience for opening night on Feb.

In 2016, “Tiny Beautiful Things” was adapted by actress and writer Nia Vardalos into a play that has since become a repertory favorite. She shared painful stories from her own life - about childhood sexual abuse, heroin addiction, her mother’s death - to find ways to connect to a letter writer’s plight.ĭear Sugar also became a podcast and Strayed’s Dear Sugar columns ended up being “big essays on life.” She eventually collected those essays into her 2012 book, “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar,” which was published a few months after “Wild.” Letter Writer #1 (Mark Anderson Phillips), Letter Writer #3, Sugar (Susi Damilano), and Letter Writer #2 (Kina Kantor) share a moment in ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ at San Francisco Playhouse.(Photo by Jessica Palopoli) Strayed soon learned it meant offering meaningful and “consoling” advice to people whose problems would consume her thoughts and challenge her, personally and as a writer. “It sounded intriguing, so I said ‘yes.’ I thought it was going to be this lark, this sideline thing, that wouldn’t demand much from me,” Strayed said in an interview this week.īut dispensing advice as Sugar turned out to be so much more than that. In February 2010, Cheryl Strayed was “joyfully” relieved, she says, to be done with the first draft of her future New York Times-best-selling memoir “Wild.” But while waiting to hear back from her editor, she received an offer to take over an unpaid project, anonymously writing the Dear Sugar advice column for the San Francisco-based literary website, The Rumpus.

Dear sugar author