Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. The useless days will add up to something. Your daughter will have his sense of humor. When you meet a man in the doorway of a Mexican restaurant who later kisses you while explaining that this kiss doesn’t ‘mean anything’ because, much as he likes you, he is not interested in having a relationship with you or anyone right now, just laugh and kiss him back. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity.
(Or, at least, the editor’s.) It’s exquisite in full, but this particular bit makes the heart tremble with raw heartness:
The book is titled after Dear Sugar #64, which remains my own favorite by a long stretch and is, evidently, many other people’s. This week, all of Sugar’s no-bullshit, wholehearted wisdom on life’s trickiest contexts - sometimes the simplest, sometimes the most complex, always the most deeply human - is released in Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar ( public library), along with several never-before-published columns, under Sugar’s real name: Cheryl Strayed. When an anonymous advice columnist by the name of “Dear Sugar” introduced herself on The Rumpus on March 11, 2010, she made her proposition clear: a “by-the-book common sense of Dear Abby and the earnest spiritual cheesiness of Cary Tennis and the butt-pluggy irreverence of Dan Savage and the closeted Upper East Side nymphomania of Miss Manners.” But in the two-some years that followed, she proceeded to deliver something tenfold punchier, more honest, more existentially profound than even such an intelligently irreverent promise could foretell.
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