Dear Sugar Was Here In Portland, Speaking Straight Into Our Ears, by Chuck Strom

Cheryl Strayed, whose memoir, Wild, became a successful movie with Reese Witherspoon, is a good storyteller whose online talks and Q&As never contain a dull moment. It was during one of my searches for her talks that I learned that she had resurrected her advice column, Dear Sugar, as a WBUR podcast with Steve Almond, her former partner in writing the column on The Rumpus. It was audio pay dirt. Strayed and Almond take, as advertised, an empathetic approach to the questions they receive from listeners, spicing their advice with a wickedly bawdy chemistry on air. The weekly podcasts also feature guests with experiences relevant to the advice subjects at hand, many of whom are memoirists like Strayed. When I heard that Dear Sugar was coming to Portland—where Strayed happens to reside—for a live recording, I wasted no time in buying a ticket.

The show was on July 8 at Revolution Hall, a converted high school auditorium that seats 850 and provides an intimate setting. I visited the theater café, Martha’s, before the show for a very reasonably priced microbrew and was treated to the sight of Strayed herself, who walked in and chatted briefly with friends a few feet away from my table. With big blond hair and a bright blue dress, already made up for the stage lights, she was a striking visual presence that did justice to what she produced on air and in print. After she left, I went upstairs to get in line for the doors to open for the general admission seating. About ninety-five percent of the people waiting with me were women, a larger proportion than I had expected. In the theater, the person seated in front of me talked to her friends about running into her group therapist in the restroom. “She helps with my body issues,” she explained. The feel of the room was open and therapeutic, and I anticipated a lot of sharing that evening.

Strayed and Almond recorded two episodes, each of which started with Angela Freeman singing the show’s theme, “Oh, dear someone, won’t you please share some bitter sweetness with me?” The advice subjects were life reinvention and addiction, with memoirists Lydia Yuknavitch and Sarah Hepola coming on to discuss their experiences and address the featured listener letters. Strayed and Almond also took questions from the audience, submitted before the show on 3×5 file cards—sometimes covered front and back with their writers’ outpourings. The episodes can be heard online on the Dear Sugar website, and I can vouch that though WBUR took a while to post them, the editing was pretty light:

http://www.wbur.org/dearsugar/2016/07/13/dear-sugar-episode-sixty-one

http://www.wbur.org/dearsugar/2016/07/20/dear-sugar-episode-sixty-two

When reduced to their essence, these and most other Dear Sugar podcasts address the same question: how do we rebuild lives that have fallen apart? The answers generally come down to the following: whatever has happened, you are not alone in your suffering, and with effort and patience, life can be made better. It may seem trite to describe it as such, but there is a lot of internal suffering in the world waiting to see the light of day, and as I sat with 850 people and watched Strayed and Almond grapple with the questions that normally stay hidden in the background of people’s lives, I admired them greatly for their work. After two and a half hours of it, though, I felt a little drained by the experience.

I did, however, retain the presence of mind to linger near the stage afterward, and I was rewarded with a brief visit with Strayed. The autograph she gave me read, “To Chuck—always trust your heart.”

Good advice.

– Chuck Strom

Freedom Isn’t Free: At the Writers Resist in Portland, by Chuck Strom