After reading Lori Gottlieb's Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, I've been trying to find other books with the same therapy/self-awareness vibe. I don't remember which website I used to find Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed, but I do appreciate the recommendation.
For a couple of years, Strayed was asked to take over a struggling online magazine's self-help column, called Dear Sugar. The book is a compilation of the questions and her responses.
What makes her approach so unique is that instead of the typical Dear Abby model, where Abby is an invisible voice dispensing advice, Strayed begins each of her responses with a personal anecdote that seems to have nothing to do with the question.
The anecdotes are vividly described, and most of them are quite miserable. Strayed grew up in a dysfunctional home, lost her beloved mother very young, and struggled through many years of poverty before becoming a best-selling writer.
Somehow, magically, she manages to brilliantly tie the life lesson she learned from her own experience to the advice she dispenses to the questioner.
As I get older, the more I see how we are all really more the same than different. We get disappointed. We figure out what we can and cannot control. We figure out our values and what's important to us. We grieve. We rejoice.
So even though my experiences may not be exactly the same as someone else's, with 40 very close, I am still able to better see the commonality of the human condition. The empathy we should be giving one another, rather than the blame.
It's not that Strayed's life made her perfect person to be a self-help columnist. She's not a therapist by training. But she possesses the self-awareness and self-confidence to look unflinchingly at even the most unpleasant moments of her life and turn it into a valuable lesson.
One experience of hers that she mentions more than once was how her first marriage was to a good man, but a little voice inside kept telling her to leave. She's now been happily married to her current husband for 25+ years. Validation that is always nice to hear: Just because a person is nice doesn't mean they're for you.
The book has some, um, UA moments, so it's not for those who are squeamish about cussing and other stuff. Yet I find it a valuable read.
