Publisher: Vintage. July 2012.
Genre: Non-fiction
Pages: 353
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Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you; you lose a family member; you can’t pay the bills—and it can be great: you’ve had the hottest sex of your life; you get that plum job; you muster the courage to write your novel. Sugar—the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus, now revealed as Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestselling memoir Wild—is the person thousands turn to for advice.
Tiny Beautiful Things brings the best of Dear Sugar in one place and includes never-before-published columns and a new introduction by Steve Almond. Rich with humor, insight, compassion—and absolute honesty—this book is a balm for everything life throws our way.
I don't necessarily want to say that this book saved me, because I wasn't close to any sort of demise, but Tiny Beautiful Things came to me at a time when I needed it most. It took me out of a book slump, and it's still leading me out of a weird post-graduation anxiety slump/perpetual panic. Reading a collection of advice columns initially just sounded like a fun time. Little did I know that Cheryl Strayed was about to blow my perceptions about life and myself apart, and help give me the tools I needed to piece it all back together into something better. It was medicine I didn't know I needed.
Beautiful advice is given to those with small, but meaningful, problems, and those with earth-shatteringly brutal issues. Your breath will be taken away by these anonymous writers' ability to share themselves and try to change, as well as by how Cheryl Strayed always knows the right thing to say. Unlike most advice columnists, she's not afraid to share parts of her own life in her responses, for which I am grateful. I don't think any book has ever made me cry and be completely astonished and hopeful more than Tiny Beautiful Things. I will be returning to this book for years to come.
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company. March 2015.
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 240
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Nina MacLaughlin spent her twenties working at a Boston newspaper, sitting behind a desk and staring at a screen. Yearning for more tangible work, she applied for a job she saw on Craigslist—Carpenter’s Assistant: Women strongly encouraged to apply—despite being a Classics major who couldn't tell a Phillips from a flathead screwdriver. She got the job, and in Hammer Head she tells the rich and entertaining story of becoming a carpenter.
Writing with infectious curiosity, MacLaughlin describes the joys and frustrations of making things by hand, reveals the challenges of working as a woman in an occupation that is 99 percent male, and explains how manual labor changed the way she sees the world.
Deciding that you want to do something completely different from what you've been doing is awkward. After the phase of questioning all of your choices ever (paired with a bit of self-hate), you move into a phase where you either have to take a leap of faith or accept where you already are. Nina MacLaughlin wasn't entirely sure what kind of change she needed, but she knew she needed one. This is the story of her incredible leap into a career path she knew nothing about and the wisdom it brought her.
MacLaughlin's writing is fantastic. You can easily finish this book in a sitting. Somehow chapters about tiling or about building stairs aren't boring at all. And Hammer Head is rife with literary references and philosophy that manage to feel 100x more interesting than they do pretentious.
It's the leap itself that's scariest. Sometimes a story of how well it can all go is all you need to go ahead and take yours. You're going to have to eventually.
What books have healed you?
