It's a beautiful thing! CHERYL'S NEXT WILD RIDE

The author can't believe her journey now includes hanging out with A-listers

- Rebekah Hebenton

Before she was a best-selling author, Cheryl Strayed was quietly one of the most popular self-help writers on the internet, anonymously dispensing advice in her Dear Sugar column. Much like her moving memoir Wild, Cheryl shared stories from her own life, detailing the deep hole she fell into after the death of her mother in her early 20s and her subsequent heroin addiction.

That column, which she still writes to this day, has been adapted into new series Tiny Beautiful Things. The Weekly chatted with Cheryl about how she copes with strangers knowing the most painful parts of her life and why she loves New Zealand.

Main character Claire shares many similiarities with you, but her life trajectory is very diff erent. How did you fi nd writing a fi ctionalised version of yourself?

The fact that the parts of the character that are autobiographical are all the younger version of Claire actually made it easier. Those early events which really shaped me like my mother’s young death of cancer, my estrangement from my father who was abusive, and being poor and working class, are things I wrote about a lot as Sugar. But what Claire does in the present is not tethered to my life and that was really liberating. So, Claire’s trajectory is a combination of so many people’s stories.