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How Cheryl Strayed’s ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ became a Kathryn Hahn Hulu series

April 3, 2023

“Tiny Beautiful Things” is an unusual hybrid. The new Hulu series is adapted from a collection of essays that Cheryl Strayed wrote anonymously for the “Dear Sugar” advice column on The Rumpus website, yet the letters are only part of the narrative thread.

The main arc focuses on Claire, a 49-year-old woman (played by Kathryn Hahn), who is one step beyond her wit’s end. She is fraying completely — her recent behavior has badly alienated her husband and her daughter and possibly cost Claire her day job even as she begins giving advice as “Dear Sugar.” The series also flashes back to the younger version of Claire, whose life is upended at 22 when her mother suddenly discovers she has terminal cancer. Claire is an extremely autobiographical version of Strayed … except where it’s not.

Cheryl Strayed and Liz Tigelaar attend the TCA Press Event for Hulu’s “Tiny Beautiful Things” at the Langham Huntington in Pasadena on January 14, 2023. (Photo by Stewart Cook/Hulu)

In a scene from “Tiny Beautiful Things,” James (Roger Aaron Brown), Clare (Kathryn Hahn), and Sondra (Conni Marie Brazelton) are shown. (Photo credit: Jessica Brooks/Hulu)

Behind the scenes on “Tiny Beautiful Things” with Liz Tigelaar. (Photo credit: Jessica Brooks/Hulu)

“Tiny Beautiful Things” stars Clare (Kathryn Hahn) and Rae Pierce-Kincade (Tanzyn Crawford) in a scene from season 1. (Photo by: Jessica Brooks/Hulu)

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The framework of younger Claire’s life – growing up working class and estranged from her father, losing her mother, getting married and divorced young, diving into drugs – is often taken directly from Strayed’s life. But the older Claire veers away wildly, having had none of the success and stability that Strayed has achieved.

Juggling those elements is tricky. Strayed and husband Brian Lindstrom tried creating a “Tiny Beautiful Things” series for HBO back in 2015 but the show never got off the ground. This time, Strayed and fellow executive producers Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern (both of whom starred in the movie version of Strayed’s smash hit memoir, “Wild”) brought in Liz Tigelaar as the showrunner.

Tigelaar, who was the showrunner on “Little Fires Everywhere” (which starred Witherspoon), apologized for being frazzled during our recent video interview by saying, “I definitely have a lot of Claire in me,” though she comes across as warmer and more together than Claire. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Were you a fan of Cheryl Strayed before this project?

I read “Tiny Beautiful Things” when it came out. I loved it and read “Wild” and saw the movie and read Cheryl’s first novel, “Torch.” When I was working on “Casual,” Michaela Watkins told me she was listening to the most amazing podcast called “Dear Sugar,” which Cheryl was co-hosting. So I spent years driving to work listening to the whole podcast. I was all-in on all things Cheryl.

I met Reese while we were working on “Little Fires Everywhere” and her producing partner Lauren Neustadter asked me, “Do you know who Cheryl Strayed is?”

I said, “My kid is named Wilder.”

Q. Really?

Yes. There’s a Mary Oliver quote in the beginning of “Wild” talking about the word “wild,” and so it was my favorite writer quoting my favorite poet. So I named my kid Wilder.

Q. When Lauren and Reese asked you to adapt this book were you nervous about creating something so different from a book you cherished?

Sometimes you just say, “Yes, of course” without even thinking, which I did. It was only after that I started thinking, “How do you make an advice column a show?”

There’s the TV logline idea: A woman who’s a mess giving advice to others. It can get whittled down to that, but I wanted it to be a deeper exploration of how we are all messes but still capable of helping others, and in helping others we can help ourselves.

I also wanted to explore how you can be all ages of yourself at the same time – I’m 47, but I can also be 32 or 13 and sometimes I’m 8 and just want to have a temper tantrum. And there’s also the idea that Claire’s volatility at 49 is not just about being a woman getting older – this isn’t about aesthetics or “How does my neck look” – but about heading into a decade that her mother never got to live into.

Q. Do you write a story and choose a letter or write a story around the letter you’ve chosen?

That was one of the hardest parts of the show. You can’t really decide one thing and retrofit the other; they have to move in tandem. We have to ask: “Where are we emotionally coming into this episode?” and “What do we want to tackle?” and “What letters that we know we want to use?” There were some letters I flagged that just had to be included. It was structurally and narratively ambitious for a half-hour show. That’s probably why I was so scared at the beginning.

Q. How involved was Cheryl?

In the beginning, I would talk to her and then go off and bring something back for a creative conversation between the two of us. Then she wanted to be in the writers’ room and we thought she’ll probably taper off and do the important Cheryl Strayed things she has to do, but she never left. If she had tried, I wouldn’t have let her.

Q. The younger Claire sections are explicitly autobiographical, but the present is not. Was it strange charting a life for someone with Strayed’s background but such a different life?

We knew the story was going to center around this middle-aged character but Cheryl didn’t want it to be her in the present and an examination of her marriage and her children. It really needed to feel like a different person. But that person had the same fundamental shaping things and those were important for Claire.

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What Cheryl says is that there’s this “ghost ship” version of her – who might she have been if she had the same past but never hiked the Pacific Crest Trail and never wrote “Wild.” The one thing they share is this anonymous advice column falling into her lap but it happens much later for Claire. The story is about her evolving as a writer from there.

Q. Is there a “ghost ship” version of you in your life?

There are a million things for so many of us – if you stayed in this or that relationship – but the first thing that popped into my head was when I was working on “Dawson’s Creek” a million years ago and Mike White was leaving to work on “Freaks and Geeks” and I also interviewed with Judd Apatow and I don’t remember the job I was offered but at the time I decided not to leave “Dawson” and I often think, “What would have happened if I’d gone to work for Judd?”

With every decision you make, you have a gain and a loss.

Q. Is that line from one of the letters in the book and on the show?

Oh, definitely. I’m just internalizing Cheryl and thinking, “What a deep quote of mine, someone should write this down” but really I’m just regurgitating her.

Orange County Register

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How Cheryl Strayed’s ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ became a Kathryn Hahn Hulu series

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