For two years, as Sugar, Strayed anonymously responded to letters seeking advice on everything from whether to have children to how to overcome jealousy. It was a no-pay job answering reader letters in the voice of a woman with a checkered history first dreamed up by the writer Steve Almond, and he was ready to pass the mantle. In 2010, two years before Wild shot her to literary stardom, Strayed took over the advice column “Dear Sugar” for the online literary magazine the Rumpus. Before Wild made her a household name, Strayed was going by another one: Sugar. It also launched Strayed’s “accidental” career as a public speaker, for which she has traveled the world teaching writing and speaking to people about the great dreams and traumas of their lives, offering whatever wisdom and encouragement she can. That book, which was adapted into a 2014 film starring Reese Witherspoon, has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide.

Wild, the 2012 memoir of her Pacific Crest Trail journey, told the story of the sudden loss of her mother to lung cancer when Strayed was 22 her subsequent struggles, including a heroin habit and a divorce and the hike that brought her back to herself. Strayed, 54, has built a career on her dual abilities to tell the whole, ugly truth about herself and to empathize with others, creating a space for self-acceptance. It’s one of the things that define her writing, that ability to draw connections-whether between a yard sale and the life she’s built with her husband, or between a cry for help from a reader and a lesson she’s learned from her own past. Strayed sees them everywhere: little signs, small reminders.

Cheryl strayed