I must admit that it took me a long time to read and review this. It came up in a search of books about grief. I mean, an advice column? I've never read advice columns, even when they were a staple in the daily paper. My attitude to advice columns is that if you can tell good advice from bad advice you don't need advice.
Some quotes from the introductions to the book:
"I've long believed that literature's greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone."
"Dear Sugar has always been quite simply about one person writing a letter to another. In pain and courage and confusion and clarity. In love and fear and faith. Dear Sugar has always been about connecting. It has always been about believing that when we dare to tell the truth about who we are and what we want and how exactly we're afraid or sad or lost or uncertain that transformation is possible, that light can be found, that courage and compassion can be mustered."
"I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the full stream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives--those fountains of inconvenient feeling--and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the business call the free market."
"The internet can be many things, of course. Too often it's successful of distraction, a place where we indulge in the modern sport of snark and schadenfreude, building the case for our own bigotries, where we mock and thereby dismiss the suffering of others."
"The lurking dream of all of us online lurkers is that we might someday confess to our own suffering, that we might find someone who will listen to us, who will not turn away in the face of our ugliest revelations."
So. I don't know if this is good advice or bad advice. But ...
All of you should read "Tiny Beautiful Things." Every single one of you. If you read it, it will make you a better person, it will make you a better manager, it will make you a better parent, it will make you a better family member, it will make you a better Church congregant, it will make you a better person. (Yes, I realise I said it twice.) It will make you a better research assistant. It will make you a better special effects technician.
If you read it. But you won't.
Oh, some, very few, of you will start. You will start to read it, and then you will realize that it is about bad things. And, maybe you will just stop reading, and put the book aside. Or throw the book aside, because it's about bad things, and who needs to read about bad things? Some of you will continue to read. Even after you get to the third essay. If, indeed, these pieces can be called essays. And you will skim the text. Or you will read, carefully not letting anything impinge upon your mind, until you get to the happy ending. And you will continue "reading" the book that way until you get to the end, and then you will say that this book is profound. And you will return it to the library, or put it on your shelf, and forget about it.
I have reviewed a lot of books in my time. I have, in fact, reviewed thousands of books. Most of them were technical literature. Technical literature, for the most part, is not profound.
I had not finished reading "Tiny Beautiful Things" as I started writing this review. I had only barely scratched the surface. But I knew I was going to read it. And I know that it would be valuable. It may not help me. It probably won't. (I am not diagnosed with treatment resistant depression for nothing.) But it will be valuable to read. And to have read. And I could tell that with pages of the book still unturned, and unskimmed.
I have just read a piece about someone who is deeply grieving. Dear Sugar/Cheryl Strayed did not reply something about this terrible ordeal you are going through will make you a better person. I know it. Dear Sugar knows it too. But the person who is still very deeply grieving doesn't know it yet. Nor would it help them to be told this. Not right now. Not necessarily in the midst of the grieving. I am a teacher. I know that some lessons have to be learned, before you can suggest that they should be learned, or why they might be valuable to learn. That's just the way learning works. That's the way our minds, and psyches, and our being, works. It seems illogical, but it's true.
I don't know yet how much value "Tiny Beautiful Things" will be to those actually grieving. But, I strongly suspect that there is material in here that will be both of comfort, and of help. And I use that order very deliberately. Those in trouble, those in grief, those in distress, those in trauma need the comfort first. In another book, "The Good Life," one of the authors makes the statement that we default to trying to fix a problem for another person, when we should be trying to face it with them. Face it, don't fix it, should be the mantra for anyone dealing with a person in distress. Very often we think we can fix it, but we actually can't. By proposing, particularly that the person in distress to do something to fix it, we are, in fact, saying that the person who is in distress is also an idiot, because anything that we can come up with, on the spot, to fix the problem, they have undoubtedly already thought about. The trauma is probably not fixable. They need comfort, and the comfort comes from someone who will face the distress, the trouble, with them. Not lecture them about what they need to do.
I'm not sure why this came up this book came up when I searched under grief. There is more about sex than there is about grief. (Those looking for the prurient bits will, however, be sadly disappointed.) Although the author does talk, quite openly, about the fact that her mother died at a relatively young age.
And there is, rather late in the book, an extremely beautiful piece: "The strange and painful truth is that I'm a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you experience my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place. I'd give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things. It showed me shades and hues I couldn't have otherwise seen. It required me to suffer. It compelled me to teach."
And, eventually, we come to the tiny beautiful things. I had been waiting for the tiny beautiful things. I mean, the title is a bit of a giveaway. And I have not been looking forward to the tiny beautiful things, because I have had the tiny beautiful things concept pushed on me for my entire life. And, I was wrong. It's not earthshaking, but it's sweet.
(By the way, as pure random chance would have it, this is my 1,000th blog posting ...)
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