Bodies, Forgiveness, and Tiny Beautiful Things: A Conversation with Cheryl Strayed

Turning In The Direction Of My Curiosity

Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.

Photo by Holly Andres

I first came across Cheryl Strayed’s writing when The Sun Magazine excerpted some of her Dear Sugar advice columns which had been previously published on The Rumpus. At the time, Sugar’s identity was anonymous but her tender, earnest, fierce words sunk deep into my core. And my core back then was in need of care. I was healing from head and brain injury and spent most of my days trying to survive a bevy of terrifying health issues and acute loneliness. No matter the topic, her answers spoke to my fear, isolation, and struggles.

A year or so later, Cheryl came forth as Sugar and Tiny Beautiful Things was published. While my health was improving, I was still thick in the throes of darkness and her words became one of my lifelines. Cheryl has a knack for acknowledging what is. I mean, really-really-really acknowledging what is, no bones about it. And then greeting it with clarity, kindness, humor, and the possibility of dismantling everything you know for a healthier, more truthful existence. This combination allowed me to see myself and my life in a different light: on one hand, less shiny; on the other, more hopeful—because as Cheryl writes: “Nobody's going to do your life for you…You have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things befall you…It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.” Slowly, I turned and drove. I’m not alone in this: Tiny Beautiful Things became a New York Times bestseller, was adapted into a play, is soon to be released as a Hulu Original television series, and the 10th Anniversary edition of the book was just published with six new columns.  

After that I devoured all Cheryl’s writing. Her staggering essay “The Love Of My Life” about her mother’s death. Her novel Torch. And, of course, Wild, her account of her trek along the Pacific Crest Trail which has sold more than four million copies and was turned into an Oscar-nominated movie starring and produced by Reese Witherspoon.

Cheryl’s writing is wholesome and earnest yet primal and raw. One moment she’s talking about the possibility of forgiving even impossible seeming wrongs, the beauty of self-nurturing, the righteousness of trees, and the next about fucking under the kitchen sink and shooting drugs into her ankle. Yet rather than feeling dichotomous, it’s kindred. Her essays have appeared in Vogue, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, among others. She’s hosted two podcasts: Sugar Calling and Dear Sugars.  She’s also written Brave Enough, a collection of cherished quotes. And has brought Dear Sugar to Substack.

Over the years, Cheryl has enjoyed tremendous success, and she’s used that to help other writers along their path. Back when I was so ill, I sent Cheryl an email sharing how profoundly her writing was helping me. It was a long email full of admiration and uneasiness. She wrote back the next day with words of support. Her kindness toward me during such a vulnerable time left an indelible imprint on my heart so I was especially delighted for this interview.

We chatted about bodies and forgiveness v. acceptance and why writers should be paid for their work.

There’s a lot of profound sorrow, fear, and grief in your work. As you're writing, are there certain places in your body that you’re experiencing this?

There are different stages of my writing practice. Before I begin, there’s this bubbling sense of beauty and wonder inside my body over all the astonishing things I'm going to write. Then as I get closer to the computer, there’s a growing sense of dread and anxiety. I wonder: Why do I have to be a writer?

That’s something physical I have to wrestle with a lot. I'm not alone in that. I think it's important that we writers talk about it. In my work as Dear Sugar, one of the core pieces of advice that I say over and over is listen to your body. If you feel that something is right or something is wrong, you’re correct. So, if you were taking strictly my advice regarding the writing, you'd say, Oh, well, I feel a sense of dread: Trust the body and don't write. But what I've learned is just as trusting pleasure or openness and relaxation in the body means you're in the right place at the right time, when it comes to writing, trusting my dread and anxiety and fear means that I'm about to do something hard and important. Something that matters a lot to me. The way I've reconciled those negative feelings as a writer, is I've learned to say, you’re part of my success because without you, dread and fear and anxiety, I probably couldn't write.

So you go from wonder, excitement, almost a sense of joy to dread, anxiety, and fear. Then you get to work and, if you’re lucky, you get to that wonderful place of losing a sense of the self and time. You reach a kind of transcendence. To transcend means to move from one realm to the other. I can't figure out if it's to move outside of the body or more deeply into it so that you and your core are at one with the universe. I don't think I've ever written anything where I didn't at some point reach that wonderful place of transcendence. That doesn't mean that everything I've written is transcendent, but rather that I’ve lost myself in the work so fully there is no difference between my body and the world.

That's so lovely. You and your body have been through a lot together. It carried you through the Pacific Crest Trail, through drugs, through what you describe as reckless sex and seemingly fantastic sex. Two births. Various weight scenarios. And probably much more than I know about! Do you feel comfortable talking about your relationship with your body these days?

That’s such a great question. You're right, I've gone through different phases. Very early in my feminism—I’ve been a feminist since I learned the word when I was six—when I was about twenty, I really understood that our collective liberation is connected to not hating our bodies. Everything we’re taught by the culture is aimed at hating our bodies. It's perplexing and tragic that even women who have the cultural ideal body feel terrible about their bodies.

As young as twenty I said, Okay, these are shackles that we must throw off. I wish I could tell you that I've thrown off those shackles. What I can tell you is I've grappled with them all these decades. And I have done everything I could possibly do to embrace other narratives about my body and about our bodies. Because I do believe that unless we do that we're doomed. My version of thinness is a size 10. That's tiny me. A lot of people would think that's big. I’ve tried to say: I'm not going to hate my body, because my body got me every step of my hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. I've tried to say: I'm not going to hate my body, because my body gave birth to babies where I was very much inside the pain and power of my body. What I've tried to do all along the way is remember to love my body. And do I love my body? Probably not. I wish I could say I'm liberated from all that stuff. If you right now had a magic wand and said, I can wave this wand, and you'll be thirty pounds lighter, I would say, please wave that wand. That makes me kind of sad. But it's true.

And yet, I do think that I'm somebody who's always wrapped my arms around really engaging with revising that narrative, too. One of the most powerful things I've done, and I'm about to do it again, is to venture into Hollywood and stand up there with movie stars on red carpets in fancy dresses, and to be who I am unapologetically. I'm not as tiny as most actresses. I'm not altered in any way in terms of wrinkles and all that stuff. I'm a 54-year-old woman who's right now about a size 14. And this is the way I'm going to show up.

One of the things I decided to do back when I was going to the Golden Globes and the Oscars and the movie premieres for Wild was to not allow myself to think anything negative about my looks or my body. Every time something would creep into my head, like, do I look fat in this dress? I would say, you're not allowed to think that. That's maybe short of love. I don't look in the mirror and go, What a fucking goddess you are! But I don't look in the mirror and say, I hate you. That is, sadly, a radical act.

I think saying you're not allowed to think those thoughts is an act of love. As you pointed out, those diminishing thoughts are drilled into us. When you say, I will stop those thoughts, to me, that’s you loving your body; it’s a protective gesture.

You’re right, that is an act of love. At the end of the day, I do reject the narrative that’s been given to girls and women about how much space our bodies should take up. But that doesn't mean I always feel great about myself, or I don't sometimes think, I better try to lose some weight. That doesn't mean, however, that I haven't done a ton of work and gotten pretty strong and secure in the body I live in. Just because I'm not all the way there doesn't mean, I haven't traveled far.

I was so moved in Wild when you ingested some of your mother’s ashes. It was so primal, so necessary to complete the union. First you formed inside her body, and then her body gave way inside yours.

That's exactly what it was in so many ways: a completing of a kind of circle. I was the same age when she died, as she was when she gave birth to me. So as she was welcoming me into her life, I was releasing her from mine. I don't have spiritual beliefs about an afterlife; I don't think she's in heaven. Early in my grief, I really understood that now my mother had to live in me and my brother and sister and the people who loved her most profoundly. That's who we live inside of when we die. I recognized that I was holding the last material aspect of her in my hand. And I didn't want to let those ashes go. I didn’t want to throw them to the wind or put them in the dirt. I wanted them—her—to be part of me. So I swallowed them.

When I was writing the first draft of Wild and I wrote that I swallowed a handful of my mom's ashes, I remember getting up from my computer because it was as if I been electrocuted. My first thought was, I'm going have to take that line out. It's too much. It revealed too primal a self. It seemed taboo. Whenever I feel that way about a sentence, soon thereafter, I’ll think no, that's exactly the sentence I was writing toward. I have to leave that in. So many people around the world have spoken to me about that sentence because they related to it. It was such a teacher for me: all those things that we think are too much are the things that art and literature are about. Our mission here is to tell not the truth, but to tell the whole truth. Not to write about who are we, but who are we really. It's in lines like that, that we are revealed.

One of the things that I love the most about your writing is, on one hand, it's very earnest, sincere, almost wholesome, and on the other, it's dirty and raw and primal. I can't think of anyone else that combines these elements in that same way. It just blows me away. I don't know how you pull it off. But you do.

Thank you so much. I'm so flattered that you see that because you're seeing something that's really clear and true. When I first began graduate school at Syracuse University, George Saunders was my mentor and Arthur Flowers and Mary Caponegro. I remember early conversations with each of them about these two opposing sides. George Saunders said, “you can write about people being good and happy in a way that's not overly sentimental.” I've always felt a little bit funny about the wholesome aspect that you're talking about. That's not cool in literary circles. It certainly wasn't cool in the nineties when everything was about snark and sarcasm and that sort of aloofness. But I always trusted that my sincerity and earnestness was going to be a powerful thread in what I had to say. I do believe at core, we are good. I also believe we’re gritty and real. We’re carnal and complicated. And sometimes monstrous, even.

Switching gears, a little: You’ve told the story about lighting a candle for the Wild movie deal with Reese Witherspoon and whispering her name whenever you passed it. How much do you believe there are greater energies influencing our lives? And how does lighting a candle and saying Reese’s name impact them?

I don't think that I lit the candle and there was some spirit realm that tapped Reese and said, Yeah, do this. Me lighting the candle and saying Reese was not about reaching her, but about settling myself. Ritualizing this moment inside this little dream: I’m going to mark this moment where Reese Witherspoon is reading my book before it's been published. This candle settles me, it focuses me, it tells me that regardless of the answer, it’s going be okay.

Oh, I love that!

Of course, because she said, yes, it becomes this feeling of I lit a candle and it worked. But that’s not really what I think about it. I tend to have a private language with myself in ways that are about the symbols around me. I'll purposely wear a particular ring or necklace to certain occasions to center me; they're like a talisman so I'm reminded of who I am and where my strength and courage are. That’s what the Reese candle was.

You walked the Pacific Crest Trail to help heal from the death of your mother amongst other things. What do you do these days to care for yourself and heal from new traumas or new layers of old traumas?

I love how you know there are new traumas. And you're right! Welcome to life, right? I walk. That’s still what I turn to when I'm struggling. It’s always clarifying. The longer the walk, the more clarifying it is. I haven't had the opportunity to go on a journey quite as long as the Pacific Crest Trail, but I've done some longer hikes and it always settles my mind. And I walk around my neighborhood every day.

I have two teenagers right now. Having two teenagers is always challenging, but during the pandemic, when school was online, it was extra challenging. There have been a lot of things I've grappled with over these last few years in a deep profound way as a mother. Also, at this moment in my life where, at 54, I’m now solidly in middle age. A lot has happened. A lot is still ahead. I have so many different paths I could take. Walking helps me think through all of that: the hard things, the exciting things, the confusing things.

You have a profound connection to nature. How do you connect with her these days and has your relationship changed at all since you walked the trail?

My relationship with nature could never change. It's like god to me. When I am in nature, I’m not only in the presence of the Divine, but I am divine. I love that that feeling of oneness happens when we’re in the wilderness. That's a powerful medicine in my life. I know when I need to feel connected to all living things, that's what nature will give me.

It's kind of like that feeling I described when you get to that transcendent place with your writing; there is no difference between being deeply inside your core self and in being in the world. That's the way I feel when I'm most deeply in nature. Transcendent. That moving from the self to the universal, or from being disconnected to connected. I wrote about this in Wild: I was so alone the first eight days of my hike I didn't even see another person, yet never have I felt so connected to all the living things.

Do you get that feeling in your back garden? Or do you have to be in the woods?

I live in a residential neighborhood in Portland with lots of trees and so, yes, I feel that a bit on my walks, but there’s nothing like being truly out in the wilderness. The deeper you are in the wilderness, that sense of transcendence is increased.

You've become this sort of modern sage. Does this feel like a lot of responsibility, or does it feel natural and comfortable for you?

It mostly feels natural and comfortable because I’ve done nothing really but write from my own very ordinary self. To have people read my writing and say: I feel changed by it, I feel inspired by it, I feel impacted by it. That was always my dream. It feels like a beautiful gift I’ve been given in exchange for the work I’ve done. I’m grateful for the exciting business-related things that have happened with my books, but the most exciting thing far and away have always been when somebody says to me, you wrote this and it changed me. And thank you.

The reason that that excites me is not because I think of myself as a modern sage. It is not because I think, well, I'm a special person who wrote something and made that happen in somebody else's heart and mind and soul. The reason that it's exciting to me is it tells me that I have stepped into what I think of as this sacred circle of writers who've written across languages and cultures and time who have made us feel more human; who have made us feel more known; who have made us feel that we're not alone.

Do you feel pressure to keep doing it?

Yes. You would think it comes from the outside but I think my anxiety is really the pressure from within myself. Whenever I write, I fear people will say: This wasn't as good as her other stuff. “They” being this anonymous group of nasty people on the internet. But the truth is, so many more people on the internet have been deeply kind to me. So much of the pressure I feel is internal.

I’m working on my next book, a memoir. It's been a long time coming. It's not been that I haven't been writing, I've been working on a million other writing projects but haven't yet finished that next book. So I do feel that pressure to get it done. I also have to accept fully the reality that I can only write it from that deepest place within me, as I've written everything; that I cannot write it from the place of, okay, you're going love this as much as you love Wild or as much as you love Tiny Beautiful Things; I cannot make that promise. Of course, the minute I say that, the reasonable mind in me says, here's the thing: that could never be true anyway because there's no accounting for what people are drawn to. I have to accept that I'm always going to give my whole mind, my whole heart, my whole spirit, my whole soul in my writing—and then release it and realize that it really isn't up to me what people make of it.

You write quite a bit about forgiveness. What does forgiveness mean to you?

Forgiveness is not really for the person you’re forgiving, it's for yourself. It's you deciding to relinquish the emotions around the wrong or the harm that was done to you that don’t serve you any longer. Instead of holding on to the anger or hurt, when we forgive, we replace those feelings with acceptance. Accepting what’s true is true is a radically transformative act because you liberate yourself from the idea that you can go back in time and make it different. When you forgive someone, you don't have to reconcile with them. You just have to let go of their power to be a force of harm in your life.

It’s not an easy thing to do. It took me many years to forgive my father. He was physically, emotionally, and sexually abusive to my mom, and also very abusive to me and my siblings. He died a couple of years ago and we’d been estranged since I was a child. It took many decades to come to that place of true forgiveness and there were many iterations of it—times when I thought that I’d forgiven him, but really hadn’t. But by the end, I didn't feel hatred or anger towards him. I felt free of him.

I didn't reconcile with him. I didn't say, it's okay what you did. I didn’t say anything to him. I spoke only to myself. I said, I will no longer be emotionally impacted by what my father did. And that's what forgiveness meant for me. It was accepting that what happened happened. It was knowing that what he’d done to me wasn't going to hurt me anymore. It wasn’t going to keep me from thriving.

That’s the kind of forgiveness we do when something big and deep and terrible has happened, like being abused by a parent. Then there's other kinds of forgiveness where somebody has wronged you in some way that's a little less primal, that I do think can be about reconciliation. Where you say, I accept your apology. Or: I understand how you made those mistakes and I'm not going to hold onto this anger or resentment or sense of harm. That’s something that we all have to practice. Most of us who love people also have to forgive those people over and over again. And be forgiven. We all make mistakes. We all cause harm. I think being literate in both making amends and allowing others to make them is a really important part of being human.

The internet really changed publishing. Over the years, it’s become harder to earn a living as a writer because, amongst other things, there’s so much free content out there. Newsletters such as Beyond or Dear Sugar offer the possibility for writers to be paid for their work. But so many of us feel uncomfortable asking to be paid. We hem and haw over putting up a paywall and wonder how best to handle the situation. Do you have thoughts on this?

Writers should be paid. There’s this idea that paying a writer is optional. We must make a profound shift about that. When we click on something and can't read it, we call it a paywall. Well, there's also a paywall between you and the apple in the grocery store, or the movie that you go see in the theater, and we don't call those things a paywall. We call those the cost of buying an apple or going to see a movie. Nobody expects to get those things for free because we understand that they have value and that work went into making them, whether it be growing the apple and delivering it to the grocery store or creating the content for the movie that you're getting admission to. Writing is the same.

We need to reframe how we value artists and how we value writers in particular. It also happens with people who teach writing. Every time I teach a course, and I see this with other writers who teach, there's this onslaught of, Can I get a scholarship? Of course, I'm all for giving scholarships to people who have financial need, but again, I do think it’s interesting that there are so many other kinds of work that people do where we do not ask for scholarships. We don’t because we do not expect them to work for free. We assume they should be paid for their services.

The problem is deep. Things like Substack, where writers are asking to be paid for their work will perhaps help remind us that the writing we’re reading has value and the people making it have to earn a living in order to keep doing it. Maybe that's one small bit of progress.

It's really a conundrum. You live with three cats and two dogs. I wonder if you could talk about your relationship with them. I'm always so curious to know how people relate to animals.

Zazu my dog is curled up like a little bean right in front of me right now. She's my baby. Of the fifty-four years of my life, there have been only three or four of them that I didn't have animals. Growing up, hundreds of animals passed through my home because not only did my mother adopt every stray that crossed our paths, and we would love them as our family members, but whenever she found an injured animal, she would take it in to the vet. She saved so many animals, but many died too and she would be the one to shepherd them with love out of this life.

When my mom died, the three or four veterinarians in the fifty-mile radius of our house, all sent big bouquets of flowers and said the animals of northern Minnesota have lost their best friend. It was true. In my mother's delirium as she was dying, she really believed that the animals she loved were surrounding her. At one point, on the last day of her life, I tried to lie on the bed next to her and she said, you can't lie there, because Max is there. She was naming the animals we'd had who died and she thought that they were lying on the bed around her. She was encased with animals. They shepherded her out of this life with love too.

I love that! It struck me when you were saying how your mom took in all these strays, is that part of the pull you felt towards Strayed as your last name?

I never thought of that. I thought of more like a person who is motherless and fatherless and has to forge their own path. But you're right, there is a connection there, too.

I feel like the essence of your writing can be held in these two sentences of yours: “After destiny has delivered what it delivers, we’re responsible for our lives.” And: “To hold the beauty of what is while also bearing the weight of our sorrow limbs that ache for what might have been is the trick of life.” Which are simply different ways of asking how do we carry sorrow?

I really so appreciate, Jane, how perceptive you are about my work and about what I try to do as a writer. I do think that there’s profound beauty in the gritty actual, and that has been my life's work as a human and as a writer, trying to always hold all of the beauty and the loss and the sorrow and the love and the triumph; all aspects of us. I try to hold them in my sentences and my scenes and my stories. To do that is the deepest kind of truth telling. And that feels like my life's mission.

Maybe this is the part you referenced as me being so wholesome. I remember one time in my twenties I was at this camp in northern Minnesota and this man walked up to me and asked if I were a kindergarten teacher. I said, “no, why do you think that?” He said, “you just exude a glowing positivity and sense of love and well being.” I was so insulted. Of course, kindergarten teachers are the most glorious people but back then I wanted to be the cool writer.

But he saw something that was real. As a kid, I used to get teased in school for smiling too much. It’s true that I have an aspect of positivity about me, I’m always looking for the gift in the curse. I’m always looking for the uplift in the most profound burden. I do think it's gotten me through as a human. To write into that has been incredibly interesting. Because, of course, when you write into that you are writing into the human condition. Because what is true, whether we like it or not, is the things that we thought we could not endure end up being the things that form us. The beauty that we have, the joy, the love, the triumphs that we get to experience every now and then are always threaded with the loss, the hardships, the scary things that we don't want to talk about or feel. Those opposite things are always present. What I'm trying to say with my writing is: no, no, no, they're not opposite at all. They're right here. They're right here in my two hands that are held out together. It's all on that profound platter from which we feed ourselves and others. They sit side by side all the time.

Oh, that’s perfect. What are your hopes for yourself?

I hope that I can do what I said about going deep into acceptance as I write this next book of mine. And I hope that I finish it before too long. But most of all, I hope that I continue to grow and evolve. As much as I wish I had that next book done by now, it's also true that I've really had an amazing decade since Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things came out because I’ve said yes to so many things. I’ve been a seeker. And I have learned lots of new stuff. I have an accidental career as a public speaker. I had an accidental career as a podcaster. I've become a screenwriter and TV writer. And all of these things happened because I said yes.

Of course, I do think that learning the word no is important. I've talked and written about that. But I also think that spirit of yes is essential to me. I hope that I keep turning in the direction of my curiosity. And that I continue to listen to that spark within me that says, do this.

Tiny Beautiful Things has been made into a television show for Hulu. What can you tell us about that?

I’m so excited about it! It's created by the wonderful writer and showrunner Liz Tigelaar and stars Kathryn Hahn as Sugar. I’m also one of the writers on the show, as well as an executive producer, so I’ve been immersed in it this past year. The fictional Sugar in the show shares some aspects of my life: she has a mother who died young and she got married young and she always wanted to be a writer, but her present-day life is very much different than mine. Kathryn is extraordinary in the role. Liz always says our Sugar in the show is like me if I hadn’t hiked the PCT. It was such a fun, fascinating, challenging adventure to create this story that is in some ways very personal to me and in other ways very much made up. The show is so different than the book, and yet I hope we captured its essence and emotional range. You laugh, you cry sometimes, you realize how very complicated we all are beneath the surface, no matter what we might show to the world.

So much it's hard right now. Where are you finding joy?

One of them is bundled up in front of me right now—Zazu! Whenever big things are hard, and frankly, big things have been hard in my life and in the world, I remember the joys of each day and each moment. Can you feel a sense of wonder as you walk through your neighborhood and you see the beautiful flowers growing in your neighbor's yard? Can you feel that wonderful happiness when you get together with friends and share laughter or jokes or conversation? Or, in my case, every day walking with my dear husband, Brian, and having the conversations we have. And loving on my cats and my dogs and on my teenagers as often as they'll let me. Those are the things that have sustained me.

I'm just back from Los Angeles, where I went to a memorial gathering for Jean-Marc Vallée, who was the director of Wild. He died suddenly last year on Christmas Day. There were so many people at the gathering who are dear to me—the people who made Wild: Reese and Laura and Bruna and many others. It was such a reminder of this thing I'm saying: of course, we were gathered for a very sad occasion, and there was a real sense of sorrow. This is a man who died young with so much ahead of him. But the essence of that gathering was joy. It was a joyous coming together to celebrate and honor somebody who was beloved by so many people who cared about telling stories that tell us more deeply who we are and who we can be. I think where I find joy is remembering that love is really what matters the very most. And not just to love, but to be loved. When we slow down and remember that there is always joy.

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