My favorites of Tiny Beautiful Things.
I finished one of the 200 books constructing a shaky tower on my bedside table. Please hold your applause.
Here are some of my favorite excerpts from Cheryl Strayed’s, Tiny Beautiful Things.
These portions are just snippets of much more lengthy responses to those seeking her advice. They’re some of my favorite parts.
I implore you to pick up a copy for yourself and enjoy.
To a man who accidentally fell in love and was afraid of the presumed commitment attached to saying it out loud.
"You get to define the terms of your life. You get to negotiate and articulate the complexities and contradictions of your feelings for this woman. You get to describe the particular kind of oh-shit-I-didn’t-mean-to-fall-in-love-but-I-sorta-did love you appear to have for her. Together, the two of you get to come to grips with what it means…
Do it. Doing so will free your relationship from the tense tangle that withholding weaves. Do you realize that your refusal to utter the word ‘love’ to your lover has created a forcefield all its own? Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel.
So release yourself from that. Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word ‘love’ to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.”
page 18.
To a depressed young writer hating herself for never being good enough to write the book she wants to write.
"… I couldn’t have written my book before I did. I simply wasn’t capable of doing so, either as a writer or a person. To get to the point I had to get to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties. I had to write a lot of sentences that never turned into anything and stories that never miraculously formed into a novel. […] I had to waste time and grieve my mother and come to terms with my childhood and have stupid and sweet and scandalous sexual relationships and grow up.
… We get the work done at the ground level. And the kindest thing I can do for you is tell you to get your ass on the floor. I know it’s hard to write, darling. But it’s harder not to. The only way to find out if you ‘have it in you’ is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your ‘limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude’ is to produce.
… Nobody is going to give you a thing. You have to give it to yourself. You have to tell us what you have to say.”
pages 56 - 59.
To a man who felt inadequate in the face of his fiancee’s grief as she mourned the mother she’d lost years before she met him.
“‘It will never be okay,’ a friend who lost her mom in her teens said to me a couple years ago. ‘It will never be okay that our mothers are dead.’ … Our moms had been dead for ages. We were both writers with kids of our own now. We had good relationships and fulfilling careers. And yet the adorned truth of what she’d said—it will never be okay—entirely unzipped me.
The truth is the same for your fiancee … She is your joy on wheels whose every experience is informed and altered by the fact that she lost the most essential, elemental, primal, and central person in her life too soon…It will never be okay that she lost her mother. And the kindest, most loving thing you can do for her is be witness to that, to muster the strength, courage, and humility it takes to accept the enormous reality of its not okayness and be okay with it the same way she has to be.
… Your mother-in-law is dead, but she lives like a shadow mother in the woman you love. Make a place for her in your life too.”
pages 97-99
To a young mother questioning the existence of God after it was discovered that her six-month-old baby had a brain tumor and would be undergoing life-threatening surgery, and implored for prayers from all she knew.
“That’s where you were the other night when you wrote me, dear woman. Pinned in place by your suffering. I woke up at 3 a.m. because I could feel you pinned there so acutely that I—a stranger—felt pinned too. So I got up to write to you. My email was a paltry little email probably not too different from the zillions of other paltry little emails you received from others, but without knowing you that those emails from people who had nothing to give you but their kind words, along with all the prayers people were praying for you, together formed a tiny raft that could just barely hold your weight as you floated through those terrible hours while you awaited your daughter’s fate.
If I believed in God, I’d see evidence of his existence in that. In your darkest hour you were held afloat by the human love that was given to you when you most needed it.
…What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you? … What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to ensure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?”
pages 145-146
To three separate letters written in from women feeling the gnawing urge to leave their current, “good enough” long-term relationships, but agonizing over the pain it would inflict on the partners they love.
“There was nothing wrong with my ex-husband. He wasn’t perfect, but he was pretty close…He was passionate and smart and sensitive and handsome and absolutely crazy about me. I was crazy about him too, though not absolutely.
… But there was in me an awful thing, from almost the very beginning: a small, clear voice that would no, no matter way I did, stop saying go.
Go, even though you love him.
Go, even though he’s kind and faithful and dear to you.
… Go, even though you’re aftaid of being alone.
Go, even though you’re sure no one will ever love you as well as he does.
Go, even though you don’t know exactly why you can’t stay.
Go, because you want to.
Because wanting to leave is enough.
… I didn’t want to stay with my ex-husband, not at my core, even though whole swaths of me did. And if there’s one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it’s that you can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It’s a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees. And because of it, I can ask the three of you the same question: Will you do it later or will you do it now?”
pages 170-174
To a middle-aged man beginning to date again, anxious he might scare off his new love interests with his emotional baggage:
“Bring your needy self when you go on that next date with a potential lover, and bring all your other selves too. The strong one. The generous one. The one who became fatherless too young and survived a war and lost one lover to cancer and another to the challenges of a decade together, but came out wiser and more tender for it. Bring the man you aspire to be, the one who already has the love he longs for. Play every piece of yourself and play it with all you’ve got until you’re not playing anymore.”
page 222
To a man who’s made it to the crossroads of choosing to stay childless or becoming a father before it’s too late.
“There’s a poem I love by Tomas Transtromer called, ‘The Blue House.’ … Every life, Transtromer writes, ‘has a sister ship,’ one that follows ‘quite another route’ than the one we ended up taking. We want it to be otherwise, but it cannot be: the people we might have been live a different, phantom life than the people we are.
And so the question is who do you intend to be. As you’ve stated in your letter, you believe you could be happy in either scenario—becoming a father or remaining childless.
… I wouldn’t know what I couldn’t know until I became a mom, and so I’m certain there are things I don’t know because I can’t know because I did.
… I’ll never know, and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”
pages 242-248
To a reader who asked Sugar what she would go back in time and tell her twenty-something self.
“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. 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. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life.
Say thank you.”
page 352-353