Penning an advice column for the literary website The Rumpus, [Strayed] worked anonymously, using the pen name Sugar, replying to letters from readings suffering everything from loveless marriages to abusive, drug-addicted brothers to disfiguring illnesses. The result: intimate, in-depth essays that not only took the letter writer's life into account but also Strayed's. Collected in a book, they make for riveting, emotionally charged reading (translation: be prepared to bawl) that leaves you significantly wiser for the experience. . . . Moving. . . . compassionate.

If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.

It was a life with purpose. And it was also a lot of fun. Fishing is fun. Hiking up mountains is fun. Building a wall out of river rocks dug up from the bottom of a glacial lake is not fun. Not at all. But it does give a work ethic that you can take anywhere in the world.

There are still things out there in the universe to contemplate and spend our lives chasing.

The tough thing is how to cultivate a life where the paramecium of happiness gets a lot of chances to get out and swim and make more paramecia. That seems like an obvious universal goal for most humans.

The reason I could fit in with so many different kinds of people was that I had no self. And then the problem is, if you don't have a self, how can you be with other people? Who the hell are you with them?

I was an only child. And it's very much my temperament. I remember playing with a piece of string in my room for hours. I had never thought about what it would be like to have siblings.