Sugar

Sugar is the writer of all of the Dear Sugar column responses selected for and included in Tiny Beautiful Things. When Dear Sugar was initially conceived of by Stephen Elliott, he tasked his friend Steve Almond with writing the advice column. In his introduction to Tiny Beautiful Things, Almond says that the “design flaw” behind the column “was that I conceived of Sugar as a persona, a woman with a troubled past and a slightly reckless tongue” (3). After abandoning the project himself and inviting Cheryl Strayed to assume the responsibility of running and writing Dear Sugar, the true Sugar phenomenon began (4). Almond remarks in his introduction that the beauty and power of Sugar is that “she’s offering something almost unheard of in our culture: radical empathy” (6). Indeed, in each of her responses to her correspondents, Sugar attends to her letter-writers’ stories, concerns, and fears with unparalleled...