I'm pretty much of the Shakespearean school. Dialogue is character. How we speak is who we are.

After the age of seven, I began living between my dad in Alaska and my mother in Baltimore. Every three or four months, I would fly the 5,000 miles between the two. And having grown up in Alaska, Baltimore was astonishing.

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.

It feels like people talk a lot, in their relationships and in therapy. But my family wasn't like that. My dad wasn't and I wasn't. Things were said, but via the language of action.

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.

I didn't write the memoir with any sort of intention of feeling better. I wrote the memoir because I had a weird need to write a good story. But once I was done, I did feel better about myself. Not better, just calmer. Because a tremendous onus had been lifted off my day-to-day.

Often, I think that my brothers were the reason I didn't do something really stupid in my teenage years; I didn't want to disappoint them. Even though was I was pretty committed to disappointing everybody else.