Scenes From the 'Dear Sugar' Coming Out Party

By: Byard Duncan

At around 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday night, the 43-year-old novelist Cheryl Strayed stood on stage at the Verdi Club in the Mission, bathed in pink light and white speckles from a rotating disco ball overhead. She adjusted her hair, waved to some of the 250 or so people in the audience who had come to see her, and waited for the standing ovation to die down.

Strayed, in a pink dress and matching bracelet, had just revealed herself as the writer behind “Dear Sugar,” an anonymous advice column that appears bi-weekly on the San Francisco-based literary web site The Rumpus. Since March of 2011, she has written more than 70 columns – some of which stretch out over 2,000 words. Sugar’s popularity (the column has been read more than 2 million times since it began) is derived largely from Strayed’s poetic and compassionate approach to giving advice. (Read an in-depth look at how Strayed became Sugar.)

“I feel so happy to be one person now,” she joked.

Steve Almond, a lanky and sardonic Boston-based author who wrote the first 26 Sugar columns, delivered an introduction.

“[Dear Sugar] is the one no-bullshit zone on the Internet,” he said. “It’s not just an honor and a pleasure; it’s a kind of obligation to finally give credit where it’s due and overdue.”

For two years, Strayed delivered deeply personal essays about abuse, sexual freedom, drug use, monogamy and the importance of family. Each column Strayed wrote was sprinkled with details about her own life—except who she was.

For many in the audience, Strayed’s coming out presented an emotional conundrum: On the one hand, they were curious to see who had been writing such “luminous, forgiving prose” for the past 24 months. On the other, they had enjoyed being able to invest any sort of expectations they wanted into the anonymous Sugar character.

“She’s cracking open a lot of stuff,” said Evany Thomas, a content strategist at Facebook who sat near the back. “I feel glad that [the column] is going to be associated with someone.”

Dean Schaffer, a community manager at the web site AllVoices.com, couldn’t help but think that “part of [Strayed’s reveal] is financial.” Still, “it won’t change what she wrote,” he said.

In March, Knopf will publish “Wild,” a memoir Strayed wrote about her time walking the Pacific Crest Trail when she was 26. And on July 10, Vintage will release “Tiny Beautiful Things,” a collection of Sugar’s columns.

After a question and answer session in which audience members asked Strayed about the ethics of polyamory and the exhaustions of “empathic overload,” she thanked the crowd. Her ability to write the column, she said, was nourished by the feedback she received from Sugar readers.

“I was always trying to give you so much love,” she said before descending from the stage to meet her fans. “What was always surprising was how much you were able to give that back to me.”