Kathryn Hahn, who stars as Clare in the adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s advice book “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar,” chose the “Ghost Ship” letter as the column that resonated with her most.
“The Ghost Ship letter really moved me. The idea that if you come to a crossroads in your life, and there are two choices, you know that whichever choice you end up making, is going to contain loss because there is going to be the road that you didn’t take,” Hahn told TheWrap. “That is such a beautiful thing to remember, that there’s always going to be that other life — that ghost ship — that you could have been on, but she has that beautiful line ‘all you can do is salute it from the shore,’ which makes me cry all the time.”
The eight-episode limited series follows Clare’s life as it falls apart in multiple ways, right when an old colleague turns up and asks her to take over the writing for an advice column called “Dear Sugar.” Based on Strayed’s real-life experience taking on the unpaid gig of writing the column anonymously for online literary magazine “The Rumpus” in 2010, many of the responses from her book, “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar” find their way into the show visually, symbolically or in Hahn’s voiceover.
Clare, a fictionalized version of Strayed, imparts wisdom and advice that she herself demonstrates in the chaos of her life. Hahn entered the complex headspace of a character, who had lost her mom at 21 years old. Younger versions of Clare (portrayed by Sarah Pidgeon and Marlowe Barkley) resurface from time to time in emotional flashbacks
“Her life when we meet her is kind of at this boiling [point]. All the coping mechanisms that she had to deal with her grief are starting to come apart. All those memories are starting to bubble up again when this ask comes from a former colleague to write this advice column,” Hahn continued. “Her past is starting to well up again in ways that she can’t control. You can’t linearly grieve someone. It’s a circular thing, and I think that’s what starts happening with Clare.”
The grief Clare holds for her mother plays a role in how she parents her daughter as well as how she interacts with her husband.
“Her marriage [is] falling apart. Her relationship with her only child [is] becoming more and more fraught and distanced. She [is] so far away from what she thought she would be at this age, which was she wanted to be an accomplished writer,” Hahn said. “Everything that she thought her life would be [is] becoming farther and farther away from what she actually had hoped and dreamt and more than that what her mother had hoped and dreamt for her.”
While Hahn agrees with all of Dear Sugar’s (Strayed’s) advice, that doesn’t mean it isn’t hard for her to take at times.
“The thing that I found I had a hard time with or that it was difficult to really listen to is listening to that tiny voice inside you that says ‘go,’” Hahn said. “I’m not literally applying that to my life, but it that is a really hard thing to always apply and just in terms of listening to your gut.”
Check out the trailer below:
All episodes of “Tiny Beautiful Things” arrive on Hulu Friday, April 7.
