![]() Being anonymous felt to me like a form of literary performance art, not the way it would always be. ![]() Revealing my identity was how I conceived of my anonymity from the start. I’ve always drawn deeply from my life in my writing, so to do so as Sugar came naturally. 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 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. Was it always your intention to write Sugar that way? Readers have really responded to your style: advice via personal essay. Sugar always tells people to trust their gut, so you could say from the very beginning, I was taking my own advice. 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. 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 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. 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. An edited version of the exchange appears below. She recently took time to answer questions on anonymity, intimacy, and her relationship with her readers. 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. ![]() Her responses covered jealousy, the decision to have (or not have) children, drug addiction, and the unanswerable questions of life. She had children, a husband, student-loan debt, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of open-minded, honest advice. The “Dear Sugar” column has generated more than two million views in the last two years.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. I like the idea of standing before the audience as a real person.” “I encourage readers to peel back the layers and reveal the truth and I’m going to do that too. “From the beginning, I said I was going to reveal my identity,” Strayed said, explaining that it was a coincidence that Wild is being published next month. ![]() “Some of my best writing is in that column.” Strayed insisted that she did not come out as Sugar on Valentine’s Day as a publicity stunt for her memoir, which has already generated much pre-publication buzz, including a profile in PW, or for Strayed’s collection of “Dear Sugar” columns, Tiny Beautiful Things, scheduled to be released by Vintage in July. “I approached it as a storyteller, “ said Strayed, who has been writing “Dear Sugar” for the past two years. In a conversation with PW earlier this week, Strayed insisted that writing an advice column could be construed as an art form. Steve Almond ( Candyfreak), the first author behind the weekly “Sugar” column, who wrote 26 columns before handing it on to Strayed, who wrote the next 60 columns, introduced her to the crowd at the ticketed event. Her advice to a frustrated writer ("Write like a motherfucker") became a rallying cry for readers of the Rumpus and has inspired mugs and posters with the phrase. “Dear Sugar” is renowned among its fans for its frank and no-holds-barred advice, peppered with references to literature, as well as with compelling stories from the author’s own life about such subjects as sexual abuse, heroin use, marital infidelity, raising children, and even writer’s block. Portland, Ore.-based writer Cheryl Strayed, the author of Torch (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), and whose memoir of her hike on the Pacific Crest Trail in 1995, Wild, will be released by Knopf in March, was introduced as Sugar before 300 guests at the Verdi Club in the city’s Mission district. Last night, The Rumpus (the literary online magazine founded in 2008 by the writer Stephen Elliot ( The Adderall Diaries), hosted a party in San Francisco to reveal the identity of its wildly popular advice columnist, “Sugar,” about whom it was only known that he or she was a published author. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |