The life of an agony aunt is one of great privilege and greater anxiety. Strangers in pain ask you questions. Big questions. Should I have kids? Should I not have kids? Should I break up with my husband? Should I break up with my mother? What is money for? Does “the one” exist? And all the agony aunt can say is: God knows, I’m sorry, here’s what I might do. But the “I” in this context is inevitably, as all people are, deeply flawed and unpleasantly human—a fact that comes reassuringly high up in the new series Tiny Beautiful Things, based on the “Dear Sugar” advice columns of Cheryl Strayed. They’re not a saint, they’re not a guru—they’re just a woman in a room, struggling eloquently through this shit.
We meet Clare (played by the exquisite Kathryn Hahn) in a bad T-shirt, in a bad marriage, drunk. Her teenage daughter is disgusted by her, she’s sleeping at work, and her writing career is dead. So when she’s invited to take over the advice column Dear Sugar, she scoffs; she has no business trying to help anyone else, she’s barely surviving herself. “Who am I to give advice to anyone?” she groans. “Who am I at all?” But she doesn’t have to be a good person to be an advice columnist, it turns out—she just has to be a good writer, someone who can articulate why we do the mean, foolish, destructive things we do—and then, how to carry on living once they’re done.
For every tiny beautiful thing that promises to irritate me about this show—its incessant tenderness, for example—there is a moment of surprise or grief that punctures it, an acknowledgement that living involves pain. Tellingly, the title comes from a letter Strayed wrote in 2011, giving advice to her twenty-something self. “One hot afternoon during the era in which you’ve gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin, you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You’re wrong. You do.” The saccharine tenderness (take the balloon) is balanced by the heroin shock, the admission of self-loathing. Hahn is an actor that can dance gorgeously in the space between.
As the series progresses, and Clare’s life cracks open, revealing memories of grief and childhood, she discovers the dark secret of advice, a secret I have forgotten and reminded myself of and forgotten again many times in the years I’ve been writing my own agony aunt column. The secret is: it goes both ways. Perhaps, hopefully, the stranger will be moved, helped, cleansed by sharing her problem, and find some solace in the response. Perhaps other readers, too, will find a flake of something useful or at least entertaining in it. But what I know now, and what Strayed explores in this show, is the way that engaging with other people’s problems forces you to look inside yourself. When a stranger asks a question, it’s really the writer who is rescued.
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