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

by Cheryl Strayed

  Sugar, my father has begun confessing to me. At first these weird confessions were small and insignificant, and I chalked them up to the fact that he was feeling his own mortality and therefore taking stock of his life. But more recently his confessions have turned into a crimes and misdemeanors festival that’s not fun for me at all. He’s been telling me about the many women he cheated on my mother with, about how he isn’t 100 percent certain that he hasn’t fathered other children, and tawdry sexual details that spawn visuals I do not want to have. He told me that when my mom got pregnant with me she didn’t want a fifth child so she wanted to abort me, but feared someone might find out so she canceled the appointment, but cut him off sex, which led to his first affair.

  This is not information I ever needed to know.

  I am a forgiving person, Sugar, but here is the kicker: he ISN’T sorry. I mean, I might be able to take all this new hideous information—like he was fucking the housekeeper in the eighties, for example—if he showed a drop of remorse, but he has none. He claims that he’s telling me and not my siblings because he knew I “won’t judge” him. What the hell gave him that idea?!

  As warped as it is, I recognize it as his attempt to bond with me. That being said, I would like him to shut up now. I suddenly don’t know how I feel about him living with me and spouting off this bullshit every day. I am not sure what to do. I feel that it’s my responsibility to care for him, but am I allowed to establish boundaries this late in the game?

  Trustee

  Dear Trustee,

  Yes, you are allowed to establish boundaries this late in the game. In fact, this would be a good idea even if your father hadn’t become an unfortunate font of naughty narratives. An elderly parent moving in with an adult child is a major life transition for both the parties (and in some cases, the adult child’s spouse and children as well). Even in the best of circumstances, it’s wise to map out a family plan in which ground rules and expectations are stated, concerns are discussed, and a plan for conflict resolution is agreed upon. When two households merge, roles of authority and responsibility must be rearranged—sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically—and they must be rearranged in a way that often reverses the long-established parent-child order. This is unquestionably a complicated thing.

  That your father has chosen to further complicate it by becoming the mad sex confessor is no fun at all. I encourage you to simplify it immediately by telling him you do not want to hear another word about his sex life. Be clear. Be direct. Be unwavering. If he doesn’t respect your wishes, cut him off at the quick. If he begins to speak of such things, tell him to stop. If he won’t stop, walk out of the room or pull over to the side of the road or do whatever it takes to remove yourself from his company. If you’re firm and consistent, he’ll eventually get the point.

  Once you’ve established this boundary, I encourage you to explore the underlying issues that may be compelling your father to speak to you so inappropriately. There’s a chance that his confessions are connected to a medical condition. Some diseases of the brain cause personality changes. If you think there’s even a chance this could be the case, and especially if you observe other changes in your father, I suggest you consult with his doctor.

  A more likely scenario is what you suppose: these confessions are your father’s warped way of bonding with you. Perhaps the best way to get him to stop telling you what you don’t want to hear is to ask him about what you’re willing to listen to. Maybe he simply needs to finally open up about his life to someone he loves. Why not try to engage him on a deeper level? Ask him to share with you other stories of his life—the ones that he’s never been brave enough to tell. Surely he’s got some that don’t involve humping the housekeeper while your mother went to the grocery store.

  For this, for both of you, I’ll hope.

  Yours,

  Sugar

  THE FUTURE HAS AN ANCIENT HEART

  Dear Sugar,

  I teach creative writing at the University of Alabama, where the majority of my students are seniors graduating soon. Most of them are English and creative writing majors/minors who are feeling a great deal of dread and anxiety about their expulsion from academia and their entry into “the real world.” Many of their friends in other disciplines have already lined up postgraduate jobs, and many of my students are tired of the “being an English major prepares you for law school” comments being made by friends and family alike, who are pressuring them toward a career in law despite having little or no interest in it. I’ve been reading your columns to my students in an attempt to pep them up and let them know that everything is going to be all right.

  Our school has decided to forgo a graduation speaker for the last five years or so, and even when we did have a graduation speaker, often they were leaders in business or former athletes, and so their message was lost on the ears of the majority of twenty-one- and twenty-two-year-olds. So, Sugar, I am asking you to deliver a graduation speech for our little class of writers. While we might have difficulty obtaining you an honorary PhD, believe me when I say that among us are some extremely talented writers, bakers, musicians, editors, designers, and video game players who will gladly write you a lyric essay, bake you a pie, write you a song, and perform countless other acts of kindness in exchange for your advice.

  Fondly,

  Cupcake & Team 408

  Dear Cupcake & Team 408,

  There’s a line by the Italian writer Carlo Levi that I think is apt here: “The future has an ancient heart.” I love it because it expresses with such grace and economy what is certainly true—that who we become is born of who we most primitively are; that we both know and cannot possibly know what it is we’ve yet to make manifest in our lives. I think it’s a useful sentiment for you to reflect upon now, sweet peas, at this moment when the future likely feels the opposite of ancient, when instead it feels like a Lamborghini that’s pulled up to the curb while every voice around demands you get in and drive.

  I’m here to tell you it’s okay to travel by foot. In fact, I recommend it. There is so much ahead that’s worth seeing, so much behind you can’t identify at top speed. Your teacher is correct: You’re going to be all right. And you’re going to be all right not because you majored in English or didn’t and not because you plan to apply to law school or don’t, but because all right is almost always where we eventually land, even if we fuck up entirely along the way.

  I know. I fucked up some things. I was an English major too. As it happens, I lied for six years about having an English degree, though I didn’t exactly mean to lie. I had gone to college and participated in a graduation ceremony. I’d walked across the stage and collected a paper baton. On that paper it said a bachelor’s degree would be mine once I finished one final class. It seemed like such an easy thing to do, but it wasn’t. And so I didn’t do it and the years slipped past, each one making it seem more unlikely that I’d ever get my degree. I’d done all the coursework except that one class. I’d gotten good grades. To claim that I had an English degree was truer than not, I told myself. But that didn’t make it true.

  You have to do what you have to do. There is absolutely nothing wrong with law school, but don’t go unless you want to be a lawyer. You can’t take a class if taking a class feels like it’s going to kill you. Faking it never works. If you don’t believe me, read Richard Wright. Read Charlotte Brontë. Read Joy Harjo. Read Toni Morrison. Read William Trevor. Read the entire Western canon.

  Or just close your eyes and remember everything you already know. 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.

  I was a waitress during most of the years that I didn’t have my English degree. My mother had been a wait
ress for many of the years that she was raising my siblings and me. She loved to read. She always wanted to go to college. One time she took a night class when I was very young and my father became enraged with her and cut her textbook into pieces with a pair of scissors. She dropped the class. I think it was biology.

  You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts.

  You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.

  I got married when I was in college. I got divorced during the years that I was lying about having an English degree. When I met the man to whom I am now married, he said, “You know, I really think you should finish your degree, not because I want you to, but because I can tell that you want to.” I thought he was sort of being an asshole. We didn’t bring up the subject again for a year.

  I understand what you’re afraid of. I understand what your parents fear. There are practical concerns. One needs money to live. And then there is a deep longing to feel legitimate in the world, to feel that others hold us in regard. I felt intermittently ashamed during my years as a waitress. In my family, I was supposed to be the one who “made it.” At times it seemed instead I had squandered my education and dishonored my dead mother by becoming a waitress like her. Sometimes I would think of this as I went from table to table with my tray, and I’d have to think of something else so I wouldn’t cry.

  Years after I no longer worked at the last restaurant where I waited tables, my first novel was published. The man who’d been my manager at the restaurant read about me in the newspaper and came to my reading. He’d often been rude and snappish with me and I’d despised him on occasion, but I was touched to see him in the bookstore that night. “All those years ago, who would’ve guessed we’d be here celebrating the publication of your novel?” he asked when we embraced.

  “I would have,” I replied.

  And it was true. I always would have guessed it, even all the time that I feared it would never happen. Being there that night was the meaning of my life. Getting there had been my every intention. When I say you don’t have to explain what you’re going to do with your life, I’m not suggesting you lounge around whining about how difficult it is. I’m suggesting you apply yourself in directions for which we have no accurate measurement. I’m talking about work. And love.

  It’s really condescending to tell you how young you are. It’s even inaccurate. Some of you who are graduating from college are not young. Some of you are older than me. But to those of you new college graduates who are indeed young, the old new college graduates will back me up on this: you are so goddamned young. Which means about eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself will over time prove to be false.

  The other two things will prove to be so true that you’ll look back in twenty years and howl.

  My mother was young too, but not like those of you who are so goddamned young. She was forty when she finally went to college. She spent the last years of her life as a college student, though she didn’t know they were her last years. She thought she was at the beginning of the next era of her life. She died a couple of months before we were both supposed to graduate from different schools. At her memorial service, my mother’s favorite professor stood up and granted her an honorary PhD.

  The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.

  I have learned this over and over and over again.

  There came a day when I decided to stop lying. I called the college from which I did not have an English degree and asked the woman who answered the phone what I needed to do to get one. She told me I had only to take one class. It could be any class. I chose Latin. I’d never studied Latin, but I wanted to know, at last, where so many of our words come from. I had a romantic idea of what it would be like to study Latin—the Romance languages are, after all, descended from it—but it wasn’t romantic. It was a lot of confusion and memorization and attempting to decipher bizarre stories about soldiers marching around ancient lands. In spite of my best efforts, I got a B.

  One thing I never forgot from my Latin class is that a language that is descended from another language is called a daughter language.

  It was the beginning of the next era of my life, like this is of yours.

  Years after I no longer lived in the state where my mother and I went to college, I traveled to that state to give a reading from my first novel. Just as my former boss had done in a different city mere weeks before, the professor who’d granted my mother a PhD at her memorial service read about me in the newspaper and came to the bookstore to hear me read. “All those years ago, who would’ve guessed we’d be here celebrating the publication of your novel?” she asked when we embraced.

  “Not me,” I replied. “Not me.”

  And it was true. I meant it as sincerely as I’d meant that I always would’ve guessed it when I’d been speaking to my boss. That both things could be true at once—my disbelief as well as my certainty—was the unification of the ancient and the future parts of me. It was everything I intended and yet still I was surprised by what I got.

  I hope you will be surprised and knowing at once. I hope you’ll always have love. I hope you’ll have days of ease and a good sense of humor. I hope one of you really will bake me a pie (banana cream, please). I hope when people ask what you’re going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you’ll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.

  And then smile very serenely until they say, Oh.

  Yours,

  Sugar

  FAUX FRIENDSHIP FOOTSIE

  Dear Sugar,

  I may be in love with my friend. He may be in love with me. At the very least, we love each other’s company. We see each other every day, talk on the phone at least two or three times a day, and miss each other when we have to say goodbye. There’s a high degree of sexual tension that quickly manifested in our friendship, which we tried to control by talking honestly to one another about it and discussing the reason it can’t come to fruition: he’s in a serious monogamous relationship with a kind, beautiful, loving woman that I also consider a friend.

  At first we tried to brush off the mutual attraction as natural—we both find each other physically attractive. Whether it’s natural or not, there were nights when it seemed unbearable not to touch, so we decided we should spend time apart. But attempting to stay apart only amplified how much we’d come to rely on each other. We’d only get a few hours into the day before one of us called the other. Then we tried to see each other only when his girlfriend was included as well. Horrifyingly, her presence didn’t dispel the tension; it just made me feel guiltier. We’ve never kissed. We’ve never crossed a physical boundary. But something is happening.

  He’s not going to leave her, at least not right now, nor would I ask him to. As strongly as I may feel about him, I recognize they do genuinely love each other. We’re not going to have an affair, as it would only end badly for everyone. We’re probably not going to stop seeing one another. We’ve tried for the last two months and can’t seem to make that happen. We are trying very, very hard to keep things platonic, but it shouldn’t be this hard.

  If we’d met at a different time, we’d probably be lovers. My friend is brilliant (but never condescending), kind,
generous, talented, passionate, interesting, charming, funny, and warm. We spend hours talking. We’re never bored. We can’t stop smiling around each other. We really like each other. Our friendship means everything to me (and him), but it’s not going to survive if we don’t find a way to curtail the lust that only seems to grow stronger.

  What do I do, Sugar? I love him. I respect and admire his girlfriend, and I want to do right by everyone. More than anything else, I want us to stay friends, so why doesn’t that seem to be working?

  “The Friend”

  Dear “The Friend,”

  It doesn’t seem to be working because you aren’t really friends with this man. You’re having a sexually repressed, mildly deceitful romantic relationship with him. You’re dry dating, and this particular version of dry dating sucks and will continue to suck until:

  a) your friend breaks up with his girlfriend so the two of you can explore your feelings for each other without being lying jackasses, or

  b) the two of you embrace the fact that we are all lying jackasses sometimes and you have an affair that includes sex, and not just the emotional affair you are so obviously having, so that you can see if this “tension” between you has a life beyond the don’t touch/don’t tell policy you’ve so achingly adopted, or

  c) you break off your relationship with your friend because you are falling in love with him and he is unavailable.

  A is out because you have no control over whether your friend will break up with his girlfriend.

  B is out because you’ve already established (wisely) that you don’t want to be a lying jackass (fun as that may be for a while).