Just in from Deadline:
Wild stars Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern have reteamed for another screen adaptation of a book by Wild author Cheryl Strayed, this time for TV. HBO has put in development Tiny Beautiful Things, a drama series based on Strayed’s bestselling 2012 book of the same name, a collection of essays compiled from Strayed’s Dear Sugar advice column. Strayed and her husband, filmmaker Brian Lindstrom, will write the TV adaptation, set to explore love, loss, lust and life through the eyes of a Portland family who live by the mantra that the truth will never kill you.
If you haven't read it, Tiny Beautiful Things is a collection of Strayed's Dear Sugar advice columns, and it's an absolute gem of a book, full of hard-won insight and an almost radical level of compassion. It's a book that basically lives on my nightstand, because I reread it THAT OFTEN. And regardless of the specificity of the situations detailed in each letter, you'd have to have a very cold heart not to identify with both Strayed and her correspondents. Tiny Beautiful Things is also a book of innovative, compressed prose. It's self-help, basically, but free of the nonsense that often plagues that genre; I'd argue that it redefines it all together. While Wild is (excellent) straight-ahead memoir, I've always considered Strayed's Dear Sugar letters to be her most interesting, experimental work. It's in this short, elegiac form that her writing is viscerally alive.
This is all to say I have no idea how this book is going to be adapted. I'm not even sure it's possible. But if they pull it off—and if it's even half as good as the source material—it'll be worth watching. And tbh? HBO, they of the dead-girl shows and Rape Game of Thronesmisogyny pile-on, could certainly use more shows helmed by women. That one of those women is Cheryl Strayed is especially good news, and if you live in Portland, here's an added bonus: Looks like we'll finally have a TV show set in our town that isn't just about handsome men solving fairy tale crimes*!
*Not that there's anything wrong with that. I like u, Grimm!