“Tiny Beautiful Things” showrunner Liz Tigelaar and author Cheryl Strayed designed the show’s central character Clare (Kathryn Hahn) based on the question: what would it have looked like if Strayed hadn’t hiked the Pacific Crest Trail.
Clare’s life mirrors Strayed’s before she became a well-known writer, taking on the mantle of an anonymous advice column called “Dear Sugar” from an old colleague in “Tiny Beautiful Things,” just as Strayed did in real life for the online literary magazine “The Rumpus” in 2010. The Hulu adaptation comes from Hello Sunshine, the production company of Reese Witherspoon, who portrayed the version of Strayed that did make the 1,100-mile solo hike in “Wild” based on Strayed’s 2012 memoir.
“We have this narrative of this adult character who isn’t me, but then that young character very much acts out many of the most painful, powerful, beautiful, true scenes from my own life. We knew that our Clare who was writing the ‘Dear Sugar’ column had to have had some of the experiences I had so those stories would make sense,” Strayed told TheWrap. “She had to be somebody who lost her mother young, she had to be somebody who had a kind of path very similar to mine, and so the past Clare has a lot of stuff in common with me and then the present day Clare took another path.”
Present-day Clare attends therapy sessions with her husband Danny (Quentin Plair). She also has a strained relationship with her own daughter Rae (Tanzyn Crawford).
“Clare is loving her daughter with full throttle attention — that’s how she was loved as a daughter. She’s wounded because she lost her mother when she was just becoming a woman,” Strayed said. “Part of her process as a mother is, ‘How do I not wound my daughter in the same place that I am wounded? We see Clare grappling when she’s saying things like, ‘Don’t say that to me because you could die tomorrow,’ it’s one way of saying, ‘I love you,’ but sometimes we say I love you in a voice that speaks through our pain, or through the ways that we were wounded and sometimes we say I love you in the ways that we were given the greatest gifts by our own mothers.”
Clare draws from her own experience (as dysfunctional as it is) for her response letters, revisiting the grief of losing her mother at a young age as well as other difficult parts of her current life.
“There are themes from [the letters] that obviously pervade the whole series. In terms of approach, there wasn’t a formula. It wasn’t like we choose the letter first and then we create the story from it,” Tigelaar said. “It was almost looking at all arcs simultaneously. We knew that, as nonlinear as the past story was, there needed to be a beginning and middle and end to that, that was going to center around the loss of her mother, and even just the different points of how things happened. They really had to all operate on these three parallel tracks. You couldn’t kind of figure out one piece without figuring out the other pieces.”
Sarah Pidgeon portrays the young adult version of Clare, who first appears in flashbacks to moments like Clare’s college acceptance as well as receiving news of her mother’s cancer diagnosis.
“One of the most powerful things about Katherine’s Clare is that she also shows us the full range of daughterhood and the full range of motherhood, and that inevitably contains darkness and light mistakes and things that were done beautifully, things that that she could go back in time and would do the exact same way and things she would do differently,” Strayed told TheWrap. “And that’s what this show is about is to say, ‘Love is not just one thing it’s all many things all at once.I hope that we showed that in those relationships between the mothers and daughters in this show.”
Emotional scenes weave a fabric of memory together between Hahn’s Clare, Pidgeon’s Clare and the childhood version portrayed by Marlow Barkley, flashing between the three women in singular moments.
“The idea is that whatever she’s feeling inside in that moment gets manifested. It’s to show [her] outsides don’t always match [her] insides. She might look like Kathryn Hahn, but she might feel like Sarah or Marlow. Katherine’s Clare is being re-inserted into these memories of her past, to have a different relationship with them,” Tigelaar told TheWrap. “That’s kind of all a part of this healing. Whether she’s telling Sarah Pidgeon, don’t give up, keep going, keep writing, or she’s holding her mother’s hand after her diagnosis, or she’s watching her mother kind of ride freely. It’s showing what healing can look like.”
All episodes of “Tiny Beautiful Things” arrive on Hulu Friday, April 7.
