lightreads

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

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Warning: this review contains a lot of sperm.

So, a while back I was thousands of miles from home, lying on the guest bed in an all-wood flat on the second story of converted stables, a quick skip from a church that’s about 400 years older than my home country. I had my feet propped up on the wall, and an Instead Cup full of sperm stuck up inside me. I was tripping on some pretty serious adrenaline. Half of it was left over hilarity from an hour before when the originator of the sperm . . . missed, and the other half was coming straight from all the finely developed instincts of the sexually-active twenty-something who is terrified of accidental pregnancy collectively shrieking “Alert! Alert! There’s sperm in you! Call out the dogs! Alert!”

And I thought “ahahaha, how old does the kid have to be before we can tell this story?” And then, “You know, Sugar would love this.”

Not a random thought. All the tweeps (yes, I tweeted this. I tweeted the hell out of this. This might have been what Twitter was invented for). All the tweeps had some hilarious and horrifying ideas about the thematically appropriate porn I should read at that particular juncture. But what I read first was The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us. Not because I needed the advice. The letter-writer’s question had no relation to any of the questions I had been asking myself about babies and my body and commitment and love and fear. But because it was a really useful piece for me in thinking about irrevocable decisions. Like a hundred million sperm creepily swarming up your cervix while three people try not to hope too hard irrevocable.

I don’t know much about advice columns, having only ever regularly read the one. That’s on purpose, since one thing I do know is that they can be actively poisonous or ignorant or hateful. (And it’s not like Sugar gets a pass from me on that one either – one of the pieces in this collection in response to a disabled letter writer is mostly clichés and platitudes, capped off with a refusal to engage with the actual meat of the question as it pertains to, you know, being disabled.

And yet. And yet I read Sugar for years. It’s not really about the advice. I mean, most of Sugar’s advice is in response to one form of “how do I do better?” or another, and her response is basically, “you do better by doing better.” Which is true as far as it goes, but from everything I know it goes exactly as far as the other half of the answer, which is “you do better by also being very lucky.”

It’s not about the advice for me. Just a way of thinking about things. A steady internet drip-drip reminder that I ought to start with compassion, instead of exhaustion. That is not usually the message I got from the internet during 2010 and 2011, let me tell you.

Once in a while, there was a piece that did ring like a true thing. The Truth That Lives There is the biggie. One of those things that I read and was honestly shocked by, and then shocked that I was shocked. Like, ‘how did you not know that you didn’t deep down know that?’ The programming, it is insidious.

But mostly, no, not about advice qua advice. That’s not why I came back. Unless you want to take The Baby Bird as advice, which I guess I did. “Ask better questions, sweet pea. The fuck is your life. Answer it.” I actually think that piece is brilliant. Not for the sexual abuse revelations or whatever, but because it’s a kind of meditation on this whole lark of giving advice, and what it said to me was that the powerful tool here is the question, not the answer. And questions, those, I’ve got.

Dear Sugar: I said yes, yes I would carry the baby for them. It’s okay to need to put my head between my knees and breathe sometimes, right? Also, is there an appropriate holiday card to explain this to the in-laws?

I didn’t get pregnant with my feet propped up on the wall and an Instead cup all up in my business. At least not that first try. I was there because I want to live a big life, I want to do the hard thing, I want to be the one who said yes. We’re totally telling the kid about it someday. That and however many other hilarious, horrifying tries it takes to make him or her. The same way Sugar told the internet about how grief was part of the making of her, and losing her father over and over again, and her work with at-risk teens. Because it will be hysterical to scandalize the poor kid, and also because the stories of where we come from are thematic, revelatory, and what these stories reveal is that a lot more than the usual compliment of people needed to get together and be their best, most generous selves, just because they wanted to make a new human. Also, that sperm is gross.

Sugar was a little bit of what got me there with my feet propped up on the wall. It was by no means a done deal at any point during the negotiations and the hard talks. But the steady stream of “be your best self,” and “you already know what you need to do,” it helped, I think. It’s not advice. No one could advise on irrevocable decisions like this one from the outside (though lots of people certainly think they have a right to, let me tell you). But it helped get me there anyway, and that’s plenty enough for me.




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