Cheryl Strayed: Tiny Beautiful Things writer on grief, wisdom and her kids reading her books
When Cheryl Strayed was still at college, her mother’s sudden death transformed her life.
She went from being a successful student to a heroin addict.
The grief she experienced, and the story of how she turned such loss around to become a best-selling author, has inspired fans around the world.
But the 54-year-old writer tells Sky News: “I have no interest in being anyone’s guru.”
Best known for her 2012 memoir Wild – an international bestseller adapted into the 2014 film both produced by and starring Reese Witherspoon – Strayed wasn’t always so willing to share her personal experiences with the world.
Laura Dern, Cheryl Strayed and Reese Witherspoon (L-R) at the premiere of Wild in 2014. Pic: AP
She describes her first deeply personal piece of writing, titled Heroin/e, as “a raw, personal essay about my grief, about my foray into drug use, and about the sorrow, the agony, essentially, I was in as a young woman – who didn’t have her mother”.
Published in a magazine called Double Take, she admits her first feeling on seeing her work in print wasn’t pride, but an urge to “go buy every copy of this magazine so nobody reads it”.
However, soon afterwards the magazine contacted her to say they’d received hundreds of letters – a bigger response than ever before – from readers saying they had truly connected with her work.
Strayed says: “That has really made me strong. I’m always afraid to publish personal things about myself. I’m always terrified.
“And yet every single time I’ve been terrified, they’re the times that people say, ‘Thank you for saying that, we needed that to be said. You saved me, you changed me, you helped me’…”
She goes on: “People need to hear the truth because they need to understand they’re not alone.”
Such a transparent approach to her life has won her a legion of fans, but Strayed admits she sometimes needs to take a step back.
“I feel like it is a gift that people feel that, kind of… open and warm towards me… But also, I’ve had to really learn.
“I’ve had to actually take some of the advice I would give to other people, learn how to maintain those boundaries.”
She adds: “I’ve already given you my best thing… The thing that I can give the world is through my writing… I have no interest in being anyone’s guru.
“And so I just try to greet people with gratitude and compassion and love, which I genuinely feel for the people who read my work and love it.”
‘Feeling less alone’
Now, following the success of Wild, another of her works has been adapted for the screen.
Disney+ original Tiny Beautiful Things is based on Strayed’s best-selling collection of essays Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar.
It was compiled from an advice column which she wrote anonymously on The Rumpus, an online literary magazine.
Kathryn Hahn plays a fictionalised version of Cheryl. Pic: Disney+
As much a personal memoir as an advice and self-help tool, Strayed says she began sharing her own personal experiences as part of her Dear Sugar advice in a nod to the many stories that had helped her during her own times of pain.
“When I was in the deep suffering in the years right after my mum died in my twenties, it was books I turned to, collections of poetry and collections of essays, and novels and plays, to see the humanity, to see the universal stories of love and loss and suffering and triumph.
“And all of those things made me feel less alone.”
Wisdom where you’d least expect it
Strayed says she has also learned to gain insights from the most unexpected of places.
“I think the most important thing ever is to stay awake and aware, and alive to wisdom in all of its forms,” she says.
“Sometimes it comes out of the mouth of your six-year-old child. Sometimes it comes from a stranger in the grocery store line.
“Sometimes it comes from a book, sometimes it comes from a therapist. Sometimes it comes from an advice columnist.
“[So it’s important] to stay awake to the fact that wisdom doesn’t come from a single source.”
Starring Kathryn Hahn, Sarah Pidgeon, Quentin Plair, and Tanzyn Crawford, Tiny Beautiful Things follows Clare – who is a fictionalised version of Strayed – as a struggling writer finding success as an advice columnist, while her own life is falling apart.
Sarah Pidgeon (L) in Tiny Beautiful Things. Pic: Disney+
No Hollywood version of grief
Touching on her mother’s death in the show, Strayed says one of the most important things for her was to portray the reality of grief – not a sanitised Hollywood version of it.
“It’s so important to me that we do not tell this false story about grief that gets told over and over again, which is like this idea that if you still experience grief years after somebody has died, that somehow, you’ve been held back and the way to heal is to let it go.
“To me, the way that grief functions is… of course, immediately after somebody has died – that is very often the fiercest, hardest grieving time.
“But you don’t leave that sorrow behind.”
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She says she has learned a valuable lesson about loss: “Grief is part of who I am. And it is both a very painful, hard thing that I wish didn’t happen to me and one of the greatest gifts of my life. And I will carry it always.
“I can carry it in a burdensome way that holds me back, that causes me pain, that forces me to be destructive, or do things that heavy weights can sometimes do.
“Or I can carry it like the basket of riches that it is…”
She goes on: “If you really want to honour that person you love so much, make something beautiful of that ugliness of that loss.”
And what do her children think?
A mother herself, she admits her children, son Carver, 18, and daughter Bobbi, 17, have yet to read any of her work.
So, does she ever worry about them learning so much about their mother’s life from her books?
On the contrary, Strayed says it’s the cherry on the cake: “It makes me feel happy that when they’re ready to know their mum on a deeper level, there’s a bunch of crazy stuff I wrote.”
Tiny Beautiful Things is streaming now on Disney+ in the UK, and on Hulu in the US.
Entertainment
Sir Rod Stewart ‘devastated’ after cancelling more US concerts as he recovers from flu
Sir Rod Stewart says he is devastated to have to cancel a series of US concerts, blaming lingering flu for the decision.
It affects four shows in Nevada, along with a further two in California, which he plans to reschedule.
They were due to take place over the next eight days.
“So sorry my friends. I’m devastated and sincerely apologise for any inconvenience to my fans. I’ll be back on stage and will see you soon,” he wrote in a message on Instagram.
Sir Rod, 80, has been struggling to recover from flu and this week had already cancelled two concerts at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas.
On Wednesday, he disclosed that his doctor had “ordered” him to take “a bit more rest”.
The star is in the midst of his epic One Last Time Tour.
Sir Rod, who was recently put on vocal rest, is due to play the legends slot at Glastonbury later this month.
In May, he was presented with a lifetime achievement award at the American Music Awards (AMAs).
Sir Rod performing at the 2025 American Music Awards in Las Vegas. Pic: Reuters
In a sign of how seriously the singer takes his health, last month he was also spotted in Italy attempting to avoid conversations to preserve his voice.
He wore a message attached to a lanyard which read: “Sorry. Cannot talk. Having vocal rest.”
In 2024, he promised he would not retire but confirmed his 2025 European and North American shows would bring an end to his “large-scale world tours”.
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The performer, best known for songs including Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?, Every Beat Of My Heart, and Maggie May, said he plans to focus on more intimate venues instead.
Sir Rod has faced other health challenges in the past.
In May 2000, he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and had surgery. In 2017, he underwent successful treatment for prostate cancer.
More often than not, the inclusion of women in an action film is shaped by the male gaze, the tropes, the stereotypical backstory and/or the unnecessary physique-revealing scenes connected to it.
“That’s a pet peeve of mine,” director Len Wiseman tells Sky News in an interview for his new John Wick spin-off starring Ana de Armas.
“I think a lot of times you see it’s overly sexualized or there’s not a realism to it, and it is important to me that [this was] approached from a female [perspective] that can be labelled: ‘A woman is strong to begin with’. I think there can be some kind of pandering in certain ways that I think is too far.”
Wiseman started his career with the female-led action film franchise Underworld starring his former partner Kate Beckinsale before directing Die Hard 4.0, Total Recall and Sleepy Hollow.
From The World Of John Wick: Ballerina serves as a spin-off to the John Wick films and is set between the events of the third and fourth movies.
It follows a young trainee assassin who looks to be the next world-renowned assassin in the film universe.
“We never wanted to go as far as Eve looking like we were doing a female John Wick. Eve is Eve and is a woman… and it’s a woman in a man’s world,” says de Armas.
“That phrase ‘fight like a girl’, we wanted that to come across as something really empowering and really pull from there. That is a motivation for her. That has been said before in a derogatory way or as something diminishing.”
De Armas insists she didn’t want to be a ‘female John Wick’. Pic: Murray Close/Lionsgate
Wiseman and de Armas both say that while they wanted Eve to be strong, they also wanted her to feel every moment of the battle. If there are choreographed fight scenes or flashy action moves, she feels them.
“I wanted her to struggle,” explains de Armas, detailing how she consistently asked for her to look more dishevelled as the film progresses.
“It didn’t come from a place of I need to prove myself, I don’t need to prove myself to anybody, but I wanted to do that from the moment we started talking about the script, we even brought on board a female writer, because it was important for me to have that.”
De Armas, similar to her soon-to-be co-star Tom Cruise, relished in undertaking the more difficult stunts and wore the bruises and marks from them like badges of honour.
Playing Eve involved stunts and even some bruises. Pic: Larry D Horricks/Lionsgate
The actress would even send photos of the markings the following day to Wiseman proudly as she jokes: “I just wanted to keep him posted, you know, on how my body was at the end of the day.”
The film was shot practically, with the explosions and countless action surprises for film fans happening on set repeatedly.
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When asked about her toughest stunt to execute, without hesitation, she mentions a scene which included prop grenades.
“All the debris and everything that was flying with those grenades were real, so most of the dust and the little things flying were getting in my eyes, and I just could not open my eyes during the scene. So in between takes, the medics were like just rinsing my eyes with some water.”
With a film set around changing the meaning of ‘fight like a girl’, de Armas says she has a clear definition of it now: “Be yourself and make people gravitate around you and your rules. You make your own rules.”
From The World Of John Wick: Ballerina is in cinemas now.
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