He said her ability to see people empathically is at odds with an Internet culture in which snark and schadenfreude are the order of the day - unlike Jesus, who saw everyone as worthy of compassion, Almond said. He did at one point compare her to Jesus Christ. Steve Almond introduced Strayed last night. But it also made me feel a bit like I might have joined a cult. Nevertheless, Pitts said she would continue to derive joy from the columns after knowing who she was, and when I told her I had been unsure about Strayed’s decision, but that apparently it was happening anyway, she smiled and said, “You’re saying yes to reality.” O’Neal had done some Internet research and found out Strayed’s identity, because a few leaks have gotten out over the last few months, but she declined to share it with Pitts and Demong because they hadn’t asked her, she said. “I just like the way she’s brutally honest.” “Someone forwarded me her column a year ago and said ‘you have to read this, it’s fucking amazing,” said Pitts. Tricia O’Neal, Jen Pitts, and Stefanie Demong had been in line for well over an hour by the time the doors opened. Lines formed round the block under the neon sign at the Verdi Club in San Francisco last night. If coming out wasn’t about the money, was it about love? Strayed said she started to get a little frustrated when Sugar started getting a following amongst her friends, because she couldn’t tell people it was her.
There are, actually, easier ways to join the one percent. And last summer our garbage got turned off because we couldn’t pay the goddamn garbage bill.” We had to borrow money from a friend two months ago to pay the mortgage. And when I talk to other writers about it, they know what I mean. Because it’s been lucky to live as a writer, but people make assumptions about it that are basically wrong. We’re by no means, financially, even, secure. “It’s not like we’re rolling in it, frankly, at all. “First of all I wouldn’t put it in those terms,” she said. Has what I would call a massive financial success changed things? Wild was also Strayed’s first six-figure book deal. But she’s going to be interviewed all over the place and the first print run is 100,000, so I don’t think coming out as Sugar is going to be the defining thing.” “I think her memoir is going to do really well on its own. “I don’t think so, I don’t know,” he said over the phone. (His film, Cherry, was premiering at the Berlin Film Festival.) I was curious whether he thought there’s an economic incentive for Strayed to come out. The Rumpus founder Stephen Elliott, who himself published a memoir called The Adderall Diaries, was in Germany for Sugar’s coming-out. (The “ write like a motherfucker” mug, for example, has been a rip-roaring success, but it goes for $10 a pop.)Įither way: Strayed’s army of Sugar followers will know to go purchase Wild, and then the collection to come.
in 2010, and despite acquiring a large following - her column Tiny Beautiful Things, giving advice to her 22-year-old self, has had “millions “of hits - her only proceeds so far are what Rumpus managing editor Isaac Fitzgerald has scraped together from selling mugs and posters based on her columns.
Strayed has gone almost entirely without payment as Dear Sugar since she took over from its previous writer, Steve Almond. If not narcissism, at least there is a reward - immediately tangible or not - for “exposure.” I, for example, would have been much less inclined to accept a paltry fee to write this story if it weren’t appearing on a website based in New York, with my byline at the top. Or? There’s also an economic reward for narcissism.
(There is now also to be a collection of the Sugar columns in Vintage paperback in July.) So you could say that she doesn’t need the publicity. (In an amazing bit of timing, it was put online today.) The book, the account of a three-month, 1100-mile hike, will be published in March by Knopf, with an extensive tour. Sugar, Cheryl Strayed, published a grief-focused novel called Torch in 2006, and there’s a 4,500-word excerpt of her upcoming memoir Wild in Vogue. Still, she did it anyway, which shows how valuable my advice is, I guess. Like many others, I’ve become obsessed with her advice, but I wasn’t sure I wanted her to come out, and told her so when I interviewed her last year. Last night, Valentine’s Day, she went public with her identity at a “coming-out” party in San Francisco. In 2010, an anonymous writer took over the advice column “Dear Sugar” at the literary website The Rumpus.
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