Starring our beloved Kathryn Hahn, Tiny Beautiful Things on Disney+ follows Clare, a floundering writer who becomes a revered advice columnist while her own life is falling apart. Her marriage is barely limping along, her teenage daughter can’t stand the sight of her and her literary career has tanked spectacularly.

When an old pal asks Clare to take over as the advice columnist Dear Sugar, her initial reaction is a hard no – largely because she thinks she has no business giving anyone advice. Eventually, though, she’s persuaded… and finds that it transforms her life in unexpected and spectacular ways.

“Obviously a lot of me is in Tiny Beautiful Things,” Cheryl Strayed, aka the real Dear Sugar, tells Stylist. “When I give advice, I often draw on experiences from my life and stories from my life, so I thought it was really important that this character share some of my most formative moments. I said, ‘She has to have a mother who died young of cancer, she has to have a father who isn’t in her life and she has to have gotten married young and divorced young. She has to have grown up working class and poor in a rural environment’. Those are the things that shaped me and made me… her past is very much like my life.

“But the present-day version of Clare is a very different person: we got to set her free into the world of fiction,” Strayed continues. “[Tiny Beautiful Things creator] Liz Tigelaar says that Clare is ‘kind of like Cheryl, if she hadn’t hiked the Pacific Crest Trail’. She went in a different direction.”

Strayed adds that the character of Clare “very much feels like a kindred spirit, in that I feel so much of her angst and struggle. Because Clare, at 49 is saying, like, basically, ‘I have to change my life’. And when she says yes to the Dear Sugar column, it wakes up something in her that she has long buried. And so I relate to her, even though it isn’t the exact path I took.”

Of course, Strayed’s own path to success has been an incredible one. This is, after all, the same woman whose epic 1,100-mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail (and bestselling memoir about the experience) was brought to life onscreen by Reese Witherspoon in Wild. Whose work has been referenced countless times over in Gilmore Girls. And whose own Dear Sugar online advice columns have inspired books, plays and podcasts.

She’s a legend, essentially. So here’s what happened when Stylist sat down to chat with the author about Tiny Beautiful Things, the enormous societal pressures faced by women, the secret to giving good advice and what happens after the happy ever after.

Tiny Beautiful Things offers up something we rarely see on screen: a woman in her 40s who doesn’t have everything figured out. Why do you think this feels so revelatory?

Any kind of art form is about telling the truth. And I think that there’s absolutely no way to tell the truth about the human condition in general, and middle-aged women in particular, without actually presenting lives that are messy and complicated. Most lives are messy and complicated. It’s very rare that somebody will have it all laced up – and even if someone does have it all tied up for a few years, things have a way of unlacing.

That’s what I find most interesting: the real, the gritty, the complicated and contradictory truths of life. Like, you can be married to somebody and really love them, and really want to stay with them and make your marriage work, and also want to liberate yourself from them and really loathe them.

That’s what we see in Clare and her husband: that they simultaneously adore each other and are furious with each other. That they’re attracted to each other, yet have still let their sex lives wane terribly. And when it comes to those scenes of Clare grappling with her teenage daughter, you have all the conflict and love and the turmoil of two people going through transitions: one is stepping into middle age and trying to figure out her life, and one stepping into adulthood and trying to figure out her life. That is, to me, the rich material of life and writing.

Once upon a time, agony aunts professed to have all the answers – and even now they tend to speak in such lofty terms to their readers. Why was it so important to you that, as Sugar, you shared your own struggles and issues with the people you were advising?

I believe the best advice doesn’t come from somebody who is presenting themselves as the all-knowing sage. Of course, there are people who have real enriched wisdom to share with us, but I think that that is almost always best delivered horizontally. Rather than saying, ‘I’m up here, I have it all figured out, so let me tell you how to live’, I’m saying, ‘I’m down here with you’.

My job isn’t to tell you how to live – I’ve never attempted to do that as Sugar – but rather to help you grapple with the questions. You’re asking me, so I’m going to listen really hard to you. And maybe I will reflect back what I hear you saying. What I often say is, ‘I think you should do this, not because I think so but because you said to me that this is what you want’. And [that’s what] really I think hard about, because a lot of us do know the answers to the questions we seek, but we’re afraid to know them. And we need someone to say to us, it’s OK. It’s OK to want to quit your job, or take this risk, or make this leap, or end this relationship, or start something new. It’s OK.

When someone shares their problems with us IRL, what should we do? How do we know if they want advice, or just need to vent?

Use your words: ask, ‘So, do you want me just to listen and offer emotional support? Or do you want me to give you advice?’

One of the best, most wonderful exchanges I had in this regard was when the Wild movie had come out, and I was getting all kinds of attention. The book had been a bestseller, but the movie took it to a whole different level, because it turns out sadly, more people watch movies than read books. It felt like the spotlight was on me, and I was just feeling very stressed and anxious about it. So I emailed Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love.

Now, at that time in our lives, we hadn’t met in person, but I knew she had been through this, so I emailed her and said, I’m just feeling all these things. And she immediately emailed me back and she asked me this question. She said, ‘Do you want me to give you love and support and tell you it’s going to be OK and love you up? Or do you want my advice?’

I love that she asked me that, because there are times that all I do want is for someone to say to me, it’s going to be OK, you’re doing great. And then other times when I want somebody to say something to me that might challenge me, or help me see a situation differently, or to, you know, maybe suggest I do something differently. So I said, ‘Oh, I want advice, please’. And she wrote me back one of the best emails of my life – it was so helpful. And it was something that I have taken to heart and drawn upon to help me through all of those anxiety-inducing moments in the public eye.

Do you think that social media has changed how we approach people for advice? I’ve noticed that we tend to bury the negative and instead showcase the more perfect aspects of our life, so how can we become braver when it comes to showcasing our flaws?

People are always afraid to show their truest face for two reasons. The first is this: they feel shame, because they think that, for whatever reason – even in spite of all the evidence, that everyone else is different. Everyone else’s house is neat. And everyone else always says the right things to their partner or their kids. Everyone does the right things on the job.

Now, we know that’s not true, and yet somehow we’ve all internalised this idea that we’re the only one who’s the bad one, right? So we’re afraid to share our flawed selves because of shame.

The second is this: we’re afraid of being rejected or condemned or judged by others. That they’ll think badly of us if we say the true things about ourselves… And yes, some people will condemn you for having a messy house, or messy life, or whatever it is you’re worried about. But most people will say, ‘Oh, my goodness, thank you so much. Me too. Thank you. What a relief.’

That’s what happens when we tell the truth: other people see themselves in us, and realise that we are more alike than different. They will feel a sense of connection with you, a sense of gratitude to you for being brave and opening up a space where they, too, can tell the truth. I think it’s just an act of trusting that.

If I were going to give you an assignment – and I know you didn’t ask for one – it would be to go and make your next social media post something vulnerable about something that you feel bad about, or self-conscious about, or ashamed of, or that you wish you could do better. Because I promise you that the responses to it will be pure affirmation and love.

I feel that these societal pressures tend to feel so much bigger for women – but does social media make the ‘have it all’ complex better or worse?

I’ve been a feminist all my life, ever since I learned the word when I was six years old. And it’s been just interesting to see the different ways the situation for women and girls and female-identifying people has changed over my life. There’s been progress, yes, but there are some things that make me feel as if we’ve gone backwards.

Let’s just narrow it down to the idea of body image. On the one hand, there’s the body positivity movement, and there are companies that actually make clothes for women in bigger sizes, and you can see a wider range of body shapes and sizes represented as beautiful in a way that just simply didn’t exist when I was a teenager. Back then, if there was somebody in a movie who had a bigger body than what is considered the norm, that person would be the punchline of the film, right. So, yes, there’s been some improvement. 

On the other hand, we still have these extreme pressures to look a certain way – something that I think social media has only heightened. I see it in my own teenage kids: I have a 17-year-old daughter and an 18-year-old son, and I see them subjected to this constant onslaught of performative beauty standards that are overwhelming and exhausting. So, it’s sort of one step forward, two steps back.

I consider myself a feminist, as do many of my friends, but so many of the powerful women in my life are still judging themselves by the same checklist that we were handed hundreds of years ago: that we should get married and have at least one baby, ideally more. And so, even though these women have amazing careers and incredibly rich lives, they feel as if they’ve failed because they’ve not checked off the right boxes in the right order. So, how can we stop comparing ourselves to other people’s life stages? And how can we move away from the box-ticking?

I think that it really demands a lot of consciousness, and we need to wake up to those stories that we’ve internalised. So, for example, you might feel ashamed of your messy house, because one of the stories you’ve told yourself is that normal people have clean houses all the time. You’ve absorbed it and made it part of your belief-system. So what you need to do to get rid of that story is tell yourself a different one. And you have to be conscious about that. You have to say, ‘This doesn’t have anything to do with how good a person I am, or what a good friend I am, or mother, or partner, or writer or whatever – you fill in the blank. Because most people would struggle with doing all the things that you have to do and keep a clean house, right?

We need to consciously invite in narratives that actually nurture us, and support us, and make us stronger and braver, basically. Because yes, we have all been fed that story which insists our lives are most important when we find a partner who loves us, and who we love back. That having children somehow validates your existence. That message is in all the fairy tales, in all the films… it’s everywhere we’ve looked, so much so that we don’t even know that we have been told that story. So we need to actively work against it and, in a conscious and mindful way, liberate ourselves from it by revising that narrative and writing our own path.

This brings us back to Tiny Beautiful Things and Clare, because we come into her own love story at a very different point. Movies and TV shows are usually focused on the first kiss and the wedding being the happy-ever-after, but this series takes us beyond that and into what happens next. Was that important to you?

I think that the most interesting thing about Clare and Danny is that they’ve both succeeded and failed. This isn’t a story of a bad marriage or a good marriage, because it’s both. They love each other in very real ways, and they have a wonderful, deep history together, and there are many ways in which they’re deeply kindred spirits. They’re both artists, for example: Danny’s a musician, Clare’s a writer. They came together with a sense of excitement and supported each other in their individual journeys. And yet it’s also true that it was their partnership, and their decision to have a child, that in some ways contributed to them having to smother those ambitions, or at least mute them to some degree. So, that thing which bonded them and brought them together has, over time, caused a sense of resentment and bitterness and disgruntlement.

It’s a reminder that life is complicated and real, and it’s beautiful and ugly, and it’s happy and sad. And all of those things, even though they are the opposites of one another, always sit together. 

I love that their lives are still very much in flux.

Absolutely. We grow and evolve so much in our 20s, when we’re all asking, ‘Who the hell am I? And what am I going to be? And who am I going to marry? And am I going to become a parent or not? Or what’s my career going to be?’ But that’s not the only time we ask ourselves those questions. We ask those questions, truly, all along the way.

I’m kind of in the same moment, frankly, that Clare’s in right now. Where it’s like, ‘Oh, guess what, I’m going through another time of becoming, so who am I? What’s the path and what’s the next chapter?’ And I think that that’s really fertile ground for any kind of story to begin, when we are lost in the woods and inside of ourselves. And so that’s where we began with Clare and Danny. 

I know your life has been portrayed on screen before, but does it still feel naked to see so many aspects of yourself laid bare in Tiny Beautiful Things?

Oh, it’s naked. Of course, with Wild it was especially so because the character was Cheryl Strayed. Reese was playing me, and it was through and through an autobiographical story – but with this show, there’s still that vulnerability. I’m a little shielded, because Kathryn isn’t playing an exact version of me, but there are so many seeds from my life. I would sit on set watching everyone reenact scenes that were taken from my past, and it was just incredibly moving and powerful… and the most surreal experience of my life.

When I think about your work, the phrase ‘radical empathy’ always springs to mind – but is this something that you’re hoping plays into the TV series? What are you hoping people will take away from it when they finish watching Tiny Beautiful Things?

I do think that radical empathy is at the core of all the work I do as Sugar, and really all the writing I do. Because when we tell the truth about the human condition, it allows us to feel compassion for others and also compassion for ourselves. It’s always worth inviting people into a story that says, ‘You can be both OK and not OK at the same time.’

What I’ve always wanted to do in my work is to make people feel less alone, and to remind people of their ability to love and to step forward – even when it hurts. I really hope that they get this from watching the show.

I’ll speak on behalf of the people, because we absolutely do get that from watching this series. But what if someone was on the fence about watching Tiny Beautiful Things? What would you say to them?

Why sit on the fence when you can watch and find out for yourself? There’s that old phrase: you can’t judge a book by its cover, and it is so true. For example, I watched The Last Of Us and absolutely loved it, but I don’t want shows like that. I resisted it. I was like, ‘Nope, I’m just not into all the violence of that post-apocalyptic thing. And it’s based on a video game, so what does that even mean?’ You know, I had everything against it. But then my daughter watched it and said, ‘Oh, it’s so good’. And I was like, OK, I’ll give it a try. My husband and I did, and we absolutely loved it.

One of the pieces of advice I often give to people is to approach life with a sense of curiosity and adventure. Because we won’t ever know anything until we give it a try. 

Tiny Beautiful Things will stream on 7 April via Hulu in the US, while viewers in the UK can watch it on Disney+ on the same date.

Main image: Holly Andres