What’s the True Story Behind ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’?
After playing Cheryl Strayed in the 2014 biopic Wild, Reese Witherspoon has teamed up with the real-life Strayed for the new Hulu drama Tiny Beautiful Things, based on the latter’s 2012 collection of essays, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar.
And this time it’s Kathryn Hahn who’s following Strayed’s footsteps. The WandaVision alum is an executive producer on Tiny Beautiful Things and leads the cast as Clare, who runs an advice column called Dear Sugar, just as Strayed once did.
“We knew Clare isn’t going to be [me exactly], but many of her experiences had to be mine,” Strayed said at the Television Critics Association winter press tour in January, per Glamour. “She had to have a mother who died young of cancer, who got married young and then divorced. She had to grow up in a rural environment like I did. Those are the things that made me, those are the things that make Clare. So those are the pieces that come from my life.”
As TIME reports, Strayed took over the literary magazine Rumpus’ column “Dear Sugar” in 2010, stepping into an advice-giver persona created by writer Steve Almond. But even the fictitious Sugar had shades of Strayed, since the writer “treated each missive like an essay, sharing bits of her personal story to make broader points about the beauty and agony of being human,” as TIME’s Lucy Feldman observed.
“I’m not some wise guru who’s like, here’s how to live,” Strayed told the magazine. “I’m right down there in the muck with you.”
Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail — which chronicles the 1,100-mile hike she embarked upon solo after losing her mother and marriage and starting to use heroin — hit bookshelves two years after her “Dear Sugar” tenure began. That book became a No. 1 bestseller, and Strayed released Tiny Beautiful Things a few months later. Nia Vardalos adapted Tiny Beautiful Things for an Off-Broadway play in 2016, and Hulu picked up a TV adaptation in 2022, with Liz Tigelaar (Little Fires Everywhere) on board as creator and showrunner and Hahn in the lead role.
Clare of Tiny Beautiful Things represents a version of Strayed who never walked the Pacific Crest Trail or released a best-selling memoir. “She is somebody who I have a lot of things in common with, but her present day life is not my life,” Strayed explained to Vanity Fair. “The things that are happening in her marriage are not the things that are happening in my marriage, her child is not mine.”
Courtesy of Hulu
That said, there are scenes directly lifted from Strayed’s life, like when a young Clare is beckoned home from college by her mother, who then says over a lasagna dinner that she’s dying of cancer. “I feel such a sense of gentleness for the younger version of myself,” Strayed told TIME. “It’s the most specific and bizarre form of therapy.”
At the TCA press tour, Hahn recalled connecting with the book Tiny Beautiful Things, which also hit The New York Times’ bestsellers list. “When I read the source material, there was such generosity in that, and such a heart in there,” Hahn said, per Glamour. “Then, when I saw Liz had adapted that into this [show], I was incredibly moved to be a part of it.”
As Hulu described in a press release, Clare isn’t sure she should be the one giving advice through Dear Sugar, since her life is falling apart. Her marriage is fizzling. Her daughter is barely talking to her. And her writing career has fallen by the wayside. But Clare ends up taking the job anyway.
“As the letter writers force Clare to revisit her most pivotal moments — the death of her mother, the fallout with her brother, even some awful sex in the back office of a funeral home — she excavates the beauty, struggle, and humor in her own life to show us that we are not beyond rescue, that it’s our stories that can ultimately save us,” the streaming service adds. “And maybe even bring us back home.”
Tiny Beautiful Things, Series Premiere, Friday, April 7, Hulu
