‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ Brings Cheryl Strayed’s “Dear Sugar” Column to Life

Strayed is joyful about putting such a complicated figure on the screen, knowing that fictional female characters are still sometimes skewered for it. She says that when the movie version of Wild came out, she was stunned by the discussions about Reese Witherspoon’s character—that is, Cheryl Strayed—as an unlikable woman. “I was like, What? Likeability has never been my problem,” she says and then chuckles. “But that was shorthand for complexity—somebody who does some things that you’re not supposed to or that maybe are contradictory.”

Hahn’s character in Tiny Beautiful Things can’t stop doing things she’s not supposed to. She has passed the age that her mother was when she died, and yet Clare has not become the writer—or the person—her mother believed she could be. “It’s a really unique way to tell the story of a life, a nonlinear memoir,” Tigelaar continues. “Like we’re comprised of all these little dots of the stories that make us, and we’re pulling out dots in no particular order, weaving them together into this tapestry to say: [These are the things] that created you, and this is what you have to draw from now.”

Those stories often resonate painfully for Clare, who remembers with horror how unappreciatively she received her mother’s last present. “It’s a very particular thing to lose a parent when you’re a teenager or in your young twenties,” Strayed says. “That group of people has a tremendous amount of regret and guilt, because they were regular teenagers. And in the last years of their mothers’ lives, they treated their mother like shit, you know? I had to grapple with that, too—going back in time and being like, I should have been more grateful for that coat she bought me in the last Christmas of her life.” She shakes her head. “But you have to live with it, you have to forgive yourself, you have to do all the things you have to do. And I love that we got to tell that story in this show.”

Tigelaar recalls that cast and crewmembers whose lives had been touched by loss often swarmed Strayed when she came on set, recognizing themselves in her evocation of grief as a long and steady hum, rather than something you get over and stay over. In fact, Strayed once wrote in a Dear Sugar column that her own writing comes from “the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place.” Strayed wanted to make sure that came through in the series, too. “At a lot of points in this season, everything’s all messed up,” she says thoughtfully. “The thing I find so moving about this character is that she leans in the direction of empathy and kindness and telling people that they can—that they can find love, that they can believe in themselves, that they can go on for another day—in the form of this advice column. She’s the conduit for not only the best parts of herself, even when everything’s gone to hell, but the best parts of us.”