Two and a half weeks ago or so, a spleet-new copy of Tiny Beautiful Things arrived in my mailbox. The arrival of said book made my entire week.
A couple of days ago I wrote a few words about the recent "discussions" (aka insult-flinging via the newspaper medium) around the prospect of the negative review. I mention this again today only because I wanted to note, before I delve into the following review/reflection, that what follows here isn't exactly a review, per se. If I had to call it anything, I would probably call it an essay--a personal essay that's about a book as much as it is about me. This, I am finding, is pretty much the only kind of "review" I can write. I have no quibbles with this book whatsoever, say what you will about the impact that such a stance may or may not have on the literary landscape.
But then, I've never really sought to establish myself as a literary critic. Some people are good at this. Me, not so much. I play my strengths in other areas.
So. Having said that, and established the not-really-a-review nature of this essay, I would now like to say this: go buy this book. Buy it. Now. Just drive to your nearest bookstore, pull out the dollar bills, and buy it. Buy it online. Then buy a box of tissues, go home, and read the whole thing in one sitting. It is quite possibly one of the best ways to spend an afternoon/evening/morning/middle of the night.
Just buy it. Seriously. You won't be sorry.
A year and a half ago or so, I was unemployed, living at home, and one hundred percent broke. I spent my days cooking meals for my parents and taking the dog for long walks along a country road that was alternately freezing cold or, as the year lengthened, scorching warm. It sounds lovely now, but at the time things were hard. I did not yet have a book contract. I did not have my driver's license, as it had expired while I was in the UK. I was, to all intents and purposes, housebound. I wrote, but writing depressed me. I spent a great deal of time sleeping, and crying in the shower.
But I also read. A lot. I went to the library every weekend and came home loaded with books. I read the Internet like it was my own personal encyclopaedia. I tweeted the most boring things from my little corner of the world. And this--the reading, and the tweeting--honest-to-goodness, was probably the only thing that kept me from going insane.
My favourite discovery from that time of creative percolation was The Rumpus, the American arts magazine. I loved it, instantly. Falling in love with The Rumpus was like falling in love with that first true crush in high-school--wanting someone because they were just that much cooler than you were, so sleek and funny and attractive and smart. I loved their articles. I wept over their essays. On and on. When I love, folks, I do it wholeheartedly, and this was no exception.
But my favourite part of The Rumpus--as is the case, I am sure, for many a reader out there--was their Dear Sugar column. Dear me, but I longed for this column each week in a way that only the starving could. I was lonely. I was poor. I was living on the generosity of my parents and feeling guiltier about it every day. I felt like a failure. What joy, then, to see a new Sugar column each week, and feel my soul sprint out of the confines of my ribcage and my little country house. What bliss, to realize how much bigger and endless and beautiful the world could be in spite of its pain and boredom and sorrow and rage.
For those of you who might not know, the Dear Sugar column is the advice column for The Rumpus. Sugar was an anonymous advice columnist, dispensing wisdom out with a bit of sass and kick. The original columnist wrote 26 pieces for the magazine before handing the reins for the column over to a new Sugar in March of 2010. This new columnist remained anonymous for nearly two years, and then "came out" earlier this year as the American novelist and essayist Cheryl Strayed. In part to celebrate this, and also in part just to celebrate the excellent wisdom of her column, a selection of essays from her two-year tenure at The Rumpus was packaged and published under the title Tiny Beautiful Things.
I will admit that I didn't read the book in one sitting. But this was only because I had to put it away to go to work. (I considered bringing the book to work with me, but figured that I would probably get into the "ugly cry" whilst doing so. Best to leave that mess at home behind closed doors.) Rest assured, though, that I finished it as soon as my shift was over.
This is a line from a review of the collection that was publishing on Entertainment Weekly:
“Dear Abby probably never did heroin. But if she had, no one would have known. Until now, that was the problem with advice columnists: They were supposed to help you solve your problems, but they didn’t reveal much about their own lives, so it was hard to understand why you should trust them.”
I was, as it happens, a fan of Dear Abby (as well as Ann Landers), but Dear Sugar has blown all other advice columnists out of the water, forever. Consider this, the start of her response to what Steve Almond, in the book's introduction, deems a "throwaway question":
(The person writing in said simply: Dear Sugar, WTF? WTF? I'm asking this because it applies every other day.)
Dear WTF,
My father's father made me jack him off when I was three and four and five. I wasn't any good at it. My hands were too small and I couldn't get the rhythm right and I didn't understand what I was doing. I only knew I didn't want to do it.
Huh. How's that for overstepping the advice columnist "no reveal about one's own life" code?
Or this, from my most favourite Dear Sugar column of all time, in response to the question of how does one write:
Do you know what that [means], sweet pea? To be humble? The word comes from the Latin words humilis and humus. To be down low. To be of the earth. To be on the ground. That’s where I went when I wrote the last word of my first book. Straight onto the cool tile floor to weep. I sobbed and I wailed and I laughed through my tears. I didn’t get up for half an hour. I was too happy and grateful to stand. I had turned 35 a few weeks before. I was two months pregnant with my first child. I didn’t know if people would think my book was good or bad or horrible or beautiful and I didn’t care. I only knew I no longer had two hearts beating in my chest. I’d pulled one out with my own bare hands. I’d suffered. I’d given it everything I had.
In some ways I feel like these words (and, by extension, the entire book) are above a review. Forgive me if that sounds precious. But how exactly do you review someone based on their advice? You can't call up the people that she's responded to and ask, so, did Sugar turn your life around, and base your decisions on that. You also can't take these little jewels of a response and mark them as you would a traditional essay, or story, or article, or whatever. You just can't. These are not pictures hung on a wall, these essays. These are the worms that borrow into the ground and find the richness hiding deep. These essays delve into territory dark and uncomfortable and hard. They ask only one thing: that people call on the brightest parts of themselves right when it's hardest to do so. When you're buried under those mountains of dirt, these essays ask that you burrow even deeper until you find the hidden thing that shines. How do you measure that? How do you critique it? I don't know.
I cried when I read this book because it is front-to-end-page full of the deepest kind of human compassion we know. In interviews that she's since given about the book, Strayed is open and candid about the fact that Sugar, in essence, is her best self, the self that came together after long hard years of work and pain and sorrow and love. Sugar, she says in another letter, is the temple that I built in my obliterated place. It's a kind of temple, a kind of reaching out to and for people, that I don't think we hear about all that often anymore. Steve Almond, in his introduction to the book, calls it radical empathy. I think that's telling--both in terms of the empathy, which is here in the book in spades, but also in terms of how very radical it in fact is, especially in this day and age. We don't do empathy that much anymore. Being our best selves has, in a way, gone out of fashion.
But reading this book has made me consider all of this anew. What does it mean, like I said those few blog posts ago, to be one's best self? What does it mean to reach down and find the Sugar buried deep in all of us, to forgive ourselves and our loved ones over and over and still over again, and find those nuggets buried deep down in the soil? What weight does a "book review" have against a question like that?
All of which is to say, I suppose, that you don't really "read" Tiny Beautiful Things. You ... absorb it. You cry it out. You put it down and think: I'd like to be a better person, world. I'd like to try harder. I want to be more.
My thanks to Random House Canada for sending me a review copy in the mail. I hope very much that you don't mind the "reflection-y" (as opposed to "review-esque") nature of this post. And, hey, if you like it, feel free to send me more free books in the mail. I will reflect on all of them to the best of my best self's ability. Possibly even with tissues.
Read the book, guys. Read the book. Be radical. It's so entirely worth it.
A couple of days ago I wrote a few words about the recent "discussions" (aka insult-flinging via the newspaper medium) around the prospect of the negative review. I mention this again today only because I wanted to note, before I delve into the following review/reflection, that what follows here isn't exactly a review, per se. If I had to call it anything, I would probably call it an essay--a personal essay that's about a book as much as it is about me. This, I am finding, is pretty much the only kind of "review" I can write. I have no quibbles with this book whatsoever, say what you will about the impact that such a stance may or may not have on the literary landscape.
But then, I've never really sought to establish myself as a literary critic. Some people are good at this. Me, not so much. I play my strengths in other areas.
So. Having said that, and established the not-really-a-review nature of this essay, I would now like to say this: go buy this book. Buy it. Now. Just drive to your nearest bookstore, pull out the dollar bills, and buy it. Buy it online. Then buy a box of tissues, go home, and read the whole thing in one sitting. It is quite possibly one of the best ways to spend an afternoon/evening/morning/middle of the night.
Just buy it. Seriously. You won't be sorry.
A year and a half ago or so, I was unemployed, living at home, and one hundred percent broke. I spent my days cooking meals for my parents and taking the dog for long walks along a country road that was alternately freezing cold or, as the year lengthened, scorching warm. It sounds lovely now, but at the time things were hard. I did not yet have a book contract. I did not have my driver's license, as it had expired while I was in the UK. I was, to all intents and purposes, housebound. I wrote, but writing depressed me. I spent a great deal of time sleeping, and crying in the shower.
But I also read. A lot. I went to the library every weekend and came home loaded with books. I read the Internet like it was my own personal encyclopaedia. I tweeted the most boring things from my little corner of the world. And this--the reading, and the tweeting--honest-to-goodness, was probably the only thing that kept me from going insane.
My favourite discovery from that time of creative percolation was The Rumpus, the American arts magazine. I loved it, instantly. Falling in love with The Rumpus was like falling in love with that first true crush in high-school--wanting someone because they were just that much cooler than you were, so sleek and funny and attractive and smart. I loved their articles. I wept over their essays. On and on. When I love, folks, I do it wholeheartedly, and this was no exception.
But my favourite part of The Rumpus--as is the case, I am sure, for many a reader out there--was their Dear Sugar column. Dear me, but I longed for this column each week in a way that only the starving could. I was lonely. I was poor. I was living on the generosity of my parents and feeling guiltier about it every day. I felt like a failure. What joy, then, to see a new Sugar column each week, and feel my soul sprint out of the confines of my ribcage and my little country house. What bliss, to realize how much bigger and endless and beautiful the world could be in spite of its pain and boredom and sorrow and rage.
For those of you who might not know, the Dear Sugar column is the advice column for The Rumpus. Sugar was an anonymous advice columnist, dispensing wisdom out with a bit of sass and kick. The original columnist wrote 26 pieces for the magazine before handing the reins for the column over to a new Sugar in March of 2010. This new columnist remained anonymous for nearly two years, and then "came out" earlier this year as the American novelist and essayist Cheryl Strayed. In part to celebrate this, and also in part just to celebrate the excellent wisdom of her column, a selection of essays from her two-year tenure at The Rumpus was packaged and published under the title Tiny Beautiful Things.
I will admit that I didn't read the book in one sitting. But this was only because I had to put it away to go to work. (I considered bringing the book to work with me, but figured that I would probably get into the "ugly cry" whilst doing so. Best to leave that mess at home behind closed doors.) Rest assured, though, that I finished it as soon as my shift was over.
This is a line from a review of the collection that was publishing on Entertainment Weekly:
“Dear Abby probably never did heroin. But if she had, no one would have known. Until now, that was the problem with advice columnists: They were supposed to help you solve your problems, but they didn’t reveal much about their own lives, so it was hard to understand why you should trust them.”
I was, as it happens, a fan of Dear Abby (as well as Ann Landers), but Dear Sugar has blown all other advice columnists out of the water, forever. Consider this, the start of her response to what Steve Almond, in the book's introduction, deems a "throwaway question":
(The person writing in said simply: Dear Sugar, WTF? WTF? I'm asking this because it applies every other day.)
Dear WTF,
My father's father made me jack him off when I was three and four and five. I wasn't any good at it. My hands were too small and I couldn't get the rhythm right and I didn't understand what I was doing. I only knew I didn't want to do it.
Huh. How's that for overstepping the advice columnist "no reveal about one's own life" code?
Or this, from my most favourite Dear Sugar column of all time, in response to the question of how does one write:
Do you know what that [means], sweet pea? To be humble? The word comes from the Latin words humilis and humus. To be down low. To be of the earth. To be on the ground. That’s where I went when I wrote the last word of my first book. Straight onto the cool tile floor to weep. I sobbed and I wailed and I laughed through my tears. I didn’t get up for half an hour. I was too happy and grateful to stand. I had turned 35 a few weeks before. I was two months pregnant with my first child. I didn’t know if people would think my book was good or bad or horrible or beautiful and I didn’t care. I only knew I no longer had two hearts beating in my chest. I’d pulled one out with my own bare hands. I’d suffered. I’d given it everything I had.
In some ways I feel like these words (and, by extension, the entire book) are above a review. Forgive me if that sounds precious. But how exactly do you review someone based on their advice? You can't call up the people that she's responded to and ask, so, did Sugar turn your life around, and base your decisions on that. You also can't take these little jewels of a response and mark them as you would a traditional essay, or story, or article, or whatever. You just can't. These are not pictures hung on a wall, these essays. These are the worms that borrow into the ground and find the richness hiding deep. These essays delve into territory dark and uncomfortable and hard. They ask only one thing: that people call on the brightest parts of themselves right when it's hardest to do so. When you're buried under those mountains of dirt, these essays ask that you burrow even deeper until you find the hidden thing that shines. How do you measure that? How do you critique it? I don't know.
I cried when I read this book because it is front-to-end-page full of the deepest kind of human compassion we know. In interviews that she's since given about the book, Strayed is open and candid about the fact that Sugar, in essence, is her best self, the self that came together after long hard years of work and pain and sorrow and love. Sugar, she says in another letter, is the temple that I built in my obliterated place. It's a kind of temple, a kind of reaching out to and for people, that I don't think we hear about all that often anymore. Steve Almond, in his introduction to the book, calls it radical empathy. I think that's telling--both in terms of the empathy, which is here in the book in spades, but also in terms of how very radical it in fact is, especially in this day and age. We don't do empathy that much anymore. Being our best selves has, in a way, gone out of fashion.
But reading this book has made me consider all of this anew. What does it mean, like I said those few blog posts ago, to be one's best self? What does it mean to reach down and find the Sugar buried deep in all of us, to forgive ourselves and our loved ones over and over and still over again, and find those nuggets buried deep down in the soil? What weight does a "book review" have against a question like that?
All of which is to say, I suppose, that you don't really "read" Tiny Beautiful Things. You ... absorb it. You cry it out. You put it down and think: I'd like to be a better person, world. I'd like to try harder. I want to be more.
My thanks to Random House Canada for sending me a review copy in the mail. I hope very much that you don't mind the "reflection-y" (as opposed to "review-esque") nature of this post. And, hey, if you like it, feel free to send me more free books in the mail. I will reflect on all of them to the best of my best self's ability. Possibly even with tissues.
Read the book, guys. Read the book. Be radical. It's so entirely worth it.
Sent you an email!!
ReplyDeleteOkay, that's twice now that I've read this post and thought, "How lovely!" and then just slipped away still smiling.
ReplyDeleteThen, just now, I thought, "Would Amanda want to know, I'd been here, read her review that's not really a review, and left smiling?"
Thought you'd want to know. :)