She strayed into a wild, beautiful life

By now, some readers know the dizzying extremes of Cheryl Strayed’s life.
She was a star student who crumbled after her mother’s death … and a heroin addict, her life adrift … and a solo hiker on the 1,100-mile Pacific Crest Trail … and an author whose work keeps being filmed.
There was “Wild,” with Reese Witherspoon as Strayed, hiking the trail. And now there’s “Tiny Beautiful Things”(shown here with Kathryn Hahn) – debuting Friday (April 7) on Hulu, with a unique concept.
As Liz Tigelaar, the series creator, told the Television Critics Association: “I started to think: What would it look like if Cheryl had never hiked the Pacific Crest Trail? ’”
She would be a mess – but a fun mess. In the series, Clare (Hahn) is sort of a quasi-Strayed. She’s 49, homeless and clueless, locked out by her estranged husband and disapproving daughter.
All of that is fictional, but weaved into it are key factors in Strayed’s real life – growing up poor and accidentally becoming an advice columnist.
“I’ve always been really aware that I had a lot of hard things happen to me at a young age, and (yet) I had an absolutely … beautiful childhood,” she told the TCA. “I grew up in poverty. I did not have indoor plumbing or electricity or running water, in a remote Minnesota woods, 20 miles from the nearest town of 400 people, and I has an amazing family.
“My mother would say, ‘We are not poor, because we are rich in love.’ Of course, I would roll my eyes at that.”
Llter, she would decide her mother was right, “Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day, she blew through her entire reserve,” she wrote in “Wild.”
Then – when both mother and daughter were top students in college – the mom was diagnosed with cancer.”When she got sick,” Strayed wrote, “I folded my life down.”
She was 22 when her mother died at 45. Strayed failed to finish college (short by only a five-page paper) or to maintain her marriage with a guy she praises. Later, she and a new guy “spent most of the summer having adventuresome sex and doing heroin,” she wrote. She was crashing downhill … then somehow righted herself at 26, in 1995 with a thousand-mile hike.
Her hard-scrabble childhood had prepared her for this, she told the TCA. “My mother would say, ‘You are going to thank me for this some day. This is character-building.’
“I would say, ‘I don’t want my character built; I want a toilet.’ But she was right.”
The advice column came much later, in 2010. She had read “Dear Sugar” online and wrote a letter to its anonymous author. That’s when she learned “Sugar” was a guy … who wanted her to take over.
“He said, ‘The thing is, it doesn’t pay anything. Nobody reads it and it’s anonymous, so you will get no credit for your work.’ Which pretty much described my writing career up until then,” she told the TCA.
“So I said yes, and it became one of the most important yeses in my life.
“The beautiful thing about being paid nothing for your writing is you do whatever you want to do. And that’s what I did. I wrote the ‘Dear Sugar’ column with all of my intelligence and love.”
By then, she was 42, with a master’s degree from Syracuse. She had drawn praise for her novel (“Torch,” based partly on her childhood) and her essays, but it was a shaky career. As she was writing “Dear Sugar,” things started to work
In 2012, “Wild” came out. It was the first selection of the revised Oprah’s Book Club and spent seven weeks atop the best-seller list. That same year, “Tiny Beautiful Things” — a collection of “Dear Sugar” columns — was published.
It would become the basis of a play (led by “Hamilton” director Thomas Kail), then a podcast and now a streaming series … showing the messy life of a writer who didn’t hike the Pacific Crest.