On March 11, 2010, an anonymous writer introduced herself as the new voice of “Dear Sugar,” an advice column on the Web site the Rumpus. Sugar claimed she would offer a combination of “the by-the-book common sense of Dear Abby and the earnest spiritual cheesiness of Cary Tennis and the butt-pluggy irreverence of Dan Savage and the closeted Upper East Side nymphomania of Miss Manners,” but soon proved to be something entirely her own: an advice columnist who spoke through frank personal experience, one whose responses went from advice to essay and back again. In The New Republic, Ruth Franklin called her “the ultimate advice columnist for the Internet age, remaking a genre that has existed, in more or less the same form, since well before Nathanael West’s acerbic novella ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ first put a face on the figure in 1933.”
Over the next two years, Sugar’s fans—a devoted readership that includes more than fifteen thousand Facebook and Twitter followers—learned bits about who she was. She was a she. She had lost her mother far too early. She had children, a husband, student-loan debt, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of open-minded, honest advice. Her responses covered jealousy, the decision to have (or not have) children, drug addiction, and the unanswerable questions of life. On Tuesday night, at a coming-out party in San Francisco, Sugar formally introduced herself as Cheryl Strayed, a writer living in Portland whose new memoir, “Wild,” will be the Rumpus Book Club’s pick for March. She recently took time to answer questions on anonymity, intimacy, and her relationship with her readers. An edited version of the exchange appears below.
How did your job as Sugar begin?
On a lark. My friend Steve Almond had been writing the column and he no longer wanted to do it, so he e-mailed me and asked if I’d like to take it over. It just so happened that I was in the midst of this tiny lull in my writing life—only days before, I’d sent the first draft of my memoir “Wild” to my editor in New York, and I was waiting for her notes. So when Steve asked I thought, “Why not?” I said yes within about thirty seconds of receiving his e-mail and then about thirty seconds later I thought of all the reasons I really should’ve said no. It paid nothing, I was busy enough writing and mothering my two young children, I didn’t have any expertise when it came to advice-giving. But I decided to give it a try anyway. Sugar always tells people to trust their gut, so you could say from the very beginning, I was taking my own advice. I’m glad I did.
Readers have really responded to your style: advice via personal essay. Was it always your intention to write Sugar that way?
Not exactly. I knew I’d write things about my life, but my very first thought was that my life would be this outlandish invention—that I wouldn’t be me, but instead someone more glamorous and snarky than I am. It’s funny to think about that now because in retrospect I find it amusing that I ever believed I could sustain something like that for more than about fifteen minutes. I’ve always drawn deeply from my life in my writing, so to do so as Sugar came naturally. It’s just my way.
Why are you coming out?
- Because I always said I would. Revealing my identity was how I conceived of my anonymity from the start. Being anonymous felt to me like a form of literary performance art, not the way it would always be.
- Because my work as Sugar is a really important part of my work as Cheryl. I want to claim it.
- Because so many people know already anyway. People who’ve read my writing as Cheryl Strayed figured out I’m Sugar, so it’s not so much a secret as it is an open secret.
- Because Sugar’s job is to bring things into the light. I’ve always loved the word “reveal.”
- Because I’m curious about what will happen next.
Your writing as Sugar is very intimate—in some cases, even more so than in your new memoir, “Wild.” Did you find yourself writing differently as Sugar? How will you deal with having a name attached to your writing as Sugar?
I wouldn’t characterize the material in the “Dear Sugar” column as more intimate than my other nonfiction writing, but instead perhaps the voice is slightly more intimate. I think a lot of people assume Sugar’s anonymity granted me the freedom to write with that sort of intimacy, but I think it’s the form itself. In each column I am doing many things, but first and foremost I am writing a letter to one person about a problem he or she is having, which, by its very nature, is an intimate exchange. One of the most fascinating things about writing the column has been the opportunity to explore the direct address in a public arena. One gets to do that so seldom as a writer. In “Wild” and “Torch” and my personal essays, the conceit is that the readers are both there and not there. I do not at any point turn and specifically acknowledge them on the page (or the screen). I’m just going along telling a story and if readers happen to be listening or want to take a message from it, great. But in the “Dear Sugar” column, the conceit is the opposite. I’ve got a message to deliver. I’m talking directly to the reader—one reader, the letter-writer, in front of many other readers—and I’m not pretending otherwise.
You’ve referred to your mother’s death from cancer as your “genesis story,” and “Wild” addresses your attempt to make sense of your life after your loss by hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. You said you’d already turned in the first draft of “Wild” by the time you were asked to be Sugar; how did the memoir come to pass, and how has writing about your mother, both in “Wild” and as Sugar, differed? Or hasn’t it?
I began writing “Wild” in the spring of 2008 when I got this idea that I should try to publish a collection of my personal essays. Most of the essays that I imagined would be in the book had been published, but I thought I’d write a few that would be originals. An essay about my hike on the P.C.T. was one of them. I started writing it and I kept writing it and by page fifty-something in my essay about hiking the P.C.T,. I still hadn’t even reached the point where I set foot on the trail. I took it into my writers’ group and they all said it was a book—a sentiment that echoed what my husband had been telling me since the night he met me nine days after I finished my hike. I didn’t believe it was a book, and yet now I can’t imagine why. Once I accepted that idea, “Wild” was born.
I don’t think I write differently about my mother’s life and death in my “Dear Sugar” columns than I do in “Wild” or in several of my personal essays. It’s for this reason more than anything that so many readers pieced together my identity before I revealed it: they recognized my mom. There is no way for me to write about my twenties without writing about how I lost my mother. Her death at the age of forty-five really is my genesis story. And her life is the foundation of mine. The extraordinary love she gave me is in my every cell, just as my grief over her death is. She’s always there in my writing in various forms. In my column “The Obliterated Place”—a column that practically obliterated me to write—I say that I’m a better person for having lost my mom young because it taught me things. And a whole lot of what it taught me shows up in “Wild” and in my Sugar columns and in my essays and also in my first book, “Torch.” I was well on my way to becoming a writer before she got sick and died. I knew that’s what I was going to do with my life. I sometimes wonder what I’d have written about if she’d lived. I suppose the answer is my mother. The one I can’t honestly imagine anymore. The who didn’t die.
A collection of your writing as Sugar will be released this summer. How did you chose the selections that will be in the book? Will there be bonus material not before seen on the Rumpus?
“Tiny Beautiful Things” is a selection of “Dear Sugar” columns from the Rumpus as well as several columns that will never appear on the Web site. I chose columns that represented a range of topics and also those that were favorites of mine and my readers. I’m particularly excited about it because it’s a book that came about because Sugar fans demanded it—so many people e-mailed me to say they hoped I’d put the columns in a book. I’m pleased I can finally say I did. Vintage will publish “Tiny Beautiful Things” on July 10th.
Do you think coming out will change your readership, or your readers’ devotion to you and the “magic” of Sugar?
I don’t think so, at least not for most people. Several of my most avid fans have figured out who I am by now and they have not become less avid. I’m not saying readers won’t experience an internal shift about the way they think of Sugar as a persona once they can attach her to the real live me, but I don’t think the substance of the experience will change. I’ve always written the column as if I were a naked woman standing in a field showing you everything but her face. I still plan to write it that way. The only thing that will be different is that you’ll know the naked woman’s name.
Photograph by Joni Kabana.
