But I kept going and a few dozen pages later, you rewarded me with Write Like a Motherfucker, a statement I printed in Sharpie on a Post-It and pinned to my bulletin board.ĭudes in the Woods gave me a different way to think about friendship and I realized I needed to share a piece of knowledge about someone with a mutual friend-that it wasn’t gossip, but a search for the best way to help. I almost stopped reading after How Do You Get Unstuck-only the second Dear Sugar- about the woman suffering after her miscarriage and you sharing the horror stories of the young women you’d encountered as a youth advocate. I won’t complain that people often assume I’m several years younger than I am, but along with that assumption comes the presumption that I haven’t lived, haven’t experienced, don’t quite know or get or “Just wait until you’re my age …” This beautiful hair says “Yeah, baby.

I can’t fathom trying to cover them up with chemicals. The strands are silvery white against my natural auburn. I checked the next morning at the same time, with the same intense sun pouring through the skylight. So maybe that gray has been there for a long time and it took the rays of sunshine through the skylight at just the right time to expose my new middle-aged reality. I’m crazy-nearsighted and in the months I’ve become a full-time writer, I have little reason to examine my face in the mirror I think I last wore mascara in October. This morning, however, my hair was streaked in silvery white strands. Now, my first gray hair appeared in 1999 when we bought our first house and I’ve had a few more here and there over the years, but they’ve always been curiosities, anomalies. On this achingly bright morning I was securing a hank of hair in a little clip when I noticed gray hairs.

Duty calls.Ī bunch of shit happened in the three days I took to read your book. To read an entire book of advice column Q&A seemed about as necessary as professional football, with the same end result for this reader as for those players: heads bashing into unmovable objects.īut my book club selected it. Needy people, foolish people frustrate me. I don’t read advice columns as a matter of principle.

Tiny little things cheryl strayed