As she says to a father of four addicted to painkillers whose business is falling apart: "I've never been in a humiliating situation when I wasn't shocked by all the 'normal' people who were also in the very same humiliating position. She knows she could just as easily be them. Sugar is a great agony aunt because she never judges anyone. In that sense this collection also reads like a memoir: although all the replies were written anonymously (Strayed "came out" as Sugar last year) we get a very real sense of a complicated, painful life behind the advice. The majority of her replies could be prefaced with the words "I've been there". And the kindest thing I can do for you is to tell you to get your ass on the floor." To a woman destroyed by her husband's infidelity: "A terrible thing happened to you, but you mustn't let it define your life." This is Sugar talking to a 26-year-old novelist with writer's block who is crippled with envy: "We get the work done on the ground level.
There's a lot of compassion and hard-won wisdom here and a lot of straight talking to people who are trying to convince themselves to do very stupid things (like hold out for a man who is evidently in love with another woman or spend a "happy family Christmas" with a drug-addicted brother who has already tried to attack his parents). But I didn't have too much of a problem with that. However great the writing – and the writing is addictively, breathtakingly great – you do have the sense of entering a quasi-literary version of The Jeremy Kyle Show. It made me laugh out loud and it made me gasp with disbelief. As for me, I couldn't bring myself to stop reading it. In fact readers of a particularly British sensibility will hate it with a passion, with its casual therapy-speak and frequent mentions of withholding and enabling.
If this is already making you bristle, you will not like this book.
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