Cheryl Strayed and Jealousy

Cheryl Strayed (via)

In case you have been out of the loop, Portland writer Cheryl Strayed is the next big thing.
After growing up in poverty, losing her mother to cancer before she finished college, a failed marriage, and barely scraping by for 20 years, she is finally receiving hard-earned recognition and success as a writer. She is also happily married with two kids. Cheryl is the author of the novel Torch and the memoir Wild, and she is Dear Sugar, the wildly popular advice columnist on the Rumpus, and has published a compilation of her columns called Tiny Beautiful Things.

Which has brought out the jealousy in a few fellow writers. Here's a recap from Jeff Baker at OregonianLive.

2012 is the Year of Cheryl Strayed. In the past six months, Strayed has gone from being a friendly, talented writer known mostly for her essays and her novel "Torch" to a friendly, talented writer known as the author of a No. 1 best-selling, Oprah-endorsed memoir ("Wild"). She also revealed herself as the author of the popular "Dear Sugar" advice column and published a collection of columns ("Tiny Beautiful Things").

Strayed's raw, honest writing can be inspiring, and inspiration can come in different forms. Erika Schickel, the author of "You're Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom," wrote an essay for LA Observed that begins: "I'm having a Cheryl Strayed problem -- her success makes me feel like a failure. There. I've said it."

Schickel goes on to describe how she found out that Sugar "was not some frowzy housewife safely tucked away in a Southern kitchen among gingham curtains and curling linoleum, but a groovy Minnesotan, living in Portland with social/cultural credentials that nearly matched my own." There was barely time to digest that news before "Wild" came out and Schickel "went down the rabbit hole." Schickel went to one of Strayed's events and then went hiking with three friends, women and writers like herself, and "the knives came out." They were jealous, and the rest of Schickel's essay is an honest discussion of jealousy among women and among writers and how Strayed "completely deserves her success, which makes her success sting all the more. It seems to highlight some kind of personal lack -- of talent, of persistence, of specialness -- in my own soul. Where did I go wrong?"

It's an interesting piece, exactly the kind of Strayed does so well. Writers are as ambitious and envious as everyone else, and those emotions can be channeled toward productivity as easily as anything else. If Strayed's success pushes Schickel or another writer to create art of their lives, it's all good.
 

The ironic part is that Cheryl/Dear Sugar addressed just this issue in her column  "We Are All Savages Inside." The letter writer, signed Awful Jealous Person, begins his/her letter as follows:

I’m jealous. I’m jealous of people who succeed at what I do (write literary fiction). I’m jealous of them even if I love them or like them or respect them. Even when I pretend to be happy when my writer friends get good news, the truth is I feel like I swallowed a spoonful of battery acid. For days afterwards I go around feeling queasy and sad, silently thinking why not me?

So why not, Sugar? I’m 31. I’ve written a novel that I’m currently revising while searching for an agent (which is turning out to be more difficult than I imagined). I received a first-rate education, holding a BA from a prestigious college and an MFA from another prestigious college. Several people in my social and literary orbit have gotten the sort of five and six-figure book deals that I dream of getting. A couple of these people are jerks, so I don’t feel guilty for resenting their good fortune, but a few of them are good people whom I like and respect and, worst of all, one is a woman I count among my very best friends.
 

Cheryl's response is nuanced.  She begins, as she always does in these columns, by coming from the place of the letter writer. 

We are all savages inside. We all want to be the chosen, the beloved, the esteemed. There isn’t a person reading this who hasn’t at one point or another had that why not me? voice pop into the interior mix when something good has happened to someone else. But that doesn’t mean you should allow it to rule your life, sweet pea. It means you have work to do.

Before we get into it, I want to talk about what we’re talking about. We are not talking about books. We’re talking about book deals. You know they are not the same thing, right? One is the art you create by writing like a motherfucker for a long time. The other is the thing the marketplace decides to do with your creation. A writer gets a book deal when he or she has written a book that: a) an editor loves and b) a publisher believes readers will purchase. The number of copies a publisher believes people will purchase varies widely. It could be ten million or seven hundred and twelve. This number has pretty much nothing to do with the quality of the book, but rather is dictated by literary style, subject matter, and genre. This number has everything to do with the amount of your book deal, which is also related to the resources available to the publishing house that wants to publish your book. The big presses can give authors six figure advances for books they believe will sell in significant numbers. The small ones cannot. Again, this has no relationship whatsoever to the quality of the books they publish.

After enlarging on this theme, Cheryl does what she does so well: she calls the letter writer on his/her self-justifications. 

A large part of your jealousy probably rises out of your outsized sense of entitlement. Privilege has a way of fucking with our heads the same way a lack of it does. There are a lot of people who’d never dream they could be a writer, let alone land, at the age of 31, a six figure book deal. You are not one of them. And you are not one of them because you’ve been given a tremendous amount of things that you did not earn or deserve, but rather that you received for the sole reason that you happen to be born into a family who had the money and wherewithal to fund your education at two colleges to which you feel compelled to attach the word “prestigious.”

What is a prestigious college? What did attending such a school allow you to believe about yourself? What assumptions do you have about the colleges that you would not describe as prestigious? What sorts of people go to prestigious colleges and not prestigious colleges? Do you believe that you had a right to a free “first-rate” education? What do you make of the people who received educations that you would not characterize as first-rate? These are not rhetorical questions. I really do want you to take out a piece of paper and write those questions down and then answer them. I believe your answers will deeply inform your current struggle with jealousy. I am not asking you these questions in order to condemn or judge you. I would ask a similar series of questions to anyone from any sort of background because I believe our early experiences and beliefs about our place in the world inform who we think we are and what we deserve and by what means it should be given to us.

 Cheryl ends on the characteristic up note:

I think it’s worth investigating, sweet pea. Doing so will make you a happier person and also a better writer, I know without a doubt.

Good luck selling your novel. I hope you get six figures for it. When you do, write to me and share the wonderful news. I promise to be over the moon for you.

 It's come full circle.

To read more about Cheryl's journey, go to articles in the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times.