Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

When challenged with the accusation that the readers’ letters seem too well-written to be genuine, she insists that they are real, although she does have a bias toward answering better-written correspondence.

A reader with the initialism WTF claims that this question—the “what the fuck?” their initialism stands for—applies to everything in life. Sugar responds with the story of one of the most perplexing and disturbing parts of her life: when her paternal grandfather would force her to masturbate him. Although she became estranged from this man at age six, when her parents divorced, the memory of what he did to her remained and caused her to ask, “What the fuck was up with that?” (90). It took her years to realize the senselessness of this event, and it returned to her when she saw a dying baby bird that reminded her of her grandfather’s penis. She felt that she had to smother the bird to put it out of its misery—and also to finally exorcise the memory of her grandfather’s crime. Ultimately, she answers WTF’s question by saying that “the fuck is [their] life” and they had better figure out what it is about (91).