“Tiny Beautiful Things” showrunner Liz Tigler and writer Cheryl Strayed designed the show’s central character, Claire (Kathryn Hahn), based on the question: what would it look like if Strayed hadn’t hiked the Pacific Crest Trail.
Claire’s life mirrors that of before Strayed became a famous writer, taking over the mantle of an anonymous advice column called “Dear Sugar” from an old colleague in “Tiny Beautiful Things”, as Strayed did in real life. online literary magazine “The Rumpus” in 2010. The Hulu adaptation comes from Reese Witherspoon’s production company Hello Sunshine, which featured Strayed’s version of a 1,100-mile solo hike in “Wild,” based on Strayed’s 2012 memoir.
“We have this narrative of this adult character who is not me, but then that young character acting out many of the most painful, powerful, beautiful, true scenes from my own life. We knew that our Claire who was in ‘Dear Sugar’ column, he had to have some of the same experiences that I had in order for those stories to make sense,” Strayed told TheWrap. “She had to be someone who lost her mother at a young age, she had to be someone who had a similar path to mine, and so the past Claire has a lot in common with me and then the present Claire took another.” the path taken.”
In the present, Claire attends therapy sessions with her husband, Danny (Quentin Player). He also has a strained relationship with his own daughter Rae (TANJIN Crawford).
“Claire is loving her daughter with all her attention—that’s how she was loved as a daughter. She’s wounded because she lost her mother when she was just becoming a woman,” said Strayed. “Part of her process as a mother is, ‘How do I not hurt my daughter where I’m hurt? We see Claire struggling when she’s saying things like, ‘Don’t tell me that Because you could die tomorrow,’ it’s a way of saying, ‘I love you,’ but sometimes we say I love you in a voice that speaks to our pain, or the way we were hurt. And sometimes we say I love you in those ways as the greatest gift we were given by our mothers.
Claire draws from her own experience (as dysfunctional as it is) for her response letters, revisiting the grief of losing her mother at a young age, as well as other difficult parts of her current life.
“There are subjects from [the letters] Which clearly pervades the entire series. In terms of approach, there was no formula. It wasn’t like we pick characters first and then we build a story out of that,” Tigelar said. “It was almost seeing all the arcs at once. We knew that, as nonlinear as the previous story was, it needed a beginning and a middle and an end that was going to center around the loss of her mother, and even how things turned out to be different. There were also different points. He actually had to work on these three parallel tracks. You can’t figure out one piece without understanding the other pieces.
Sarah Pidgeon portrays the young adult version of Claire, first appearing in flashbacks in moments such as Claire’s college acceptance as well as receiving news of her mother’s cancer diagnosis.
“One of the most powerful things about Catherine Claire is that she shows us the full range of daughterhood and also the full range of motherhood, and there are inevitably dark and light mistakes and things that were done beautifully, Things she could go back in time and exactly the same way and things she would do differently,” Strayed told TheWrap. “And that’s what this show is about, ‘love isn’t just one thing, it’s all things together. I hope we’ve shown the relationships between mothers and daughters in this show.’
Emotional scenes weave together a web of memory between a childhood version portrayed by Hans Claire, Pigeons Claire, and Marlo Barclay, flashing through in fantastical moments between the three women.
“The idea is that whatever she’s feeling in that moment becomes manifest. It’s to show [her] outliers don’t always match [her] Inside. She may look like Kathryn Hahn, but she may feel more like Sarah or Marlo. Claire’s being reintroduced into these memories of her past by Katherine in order to have a different relationship with them,” Tigelaar told TheWrap. “It’s all part of this healing. Whether it’s telling Sarah Pidgeon, don’t give up, keep going, keep writing, or she’s holding her mom’s hand after her diagnosis, or she’s watching her mom ride freely. It’s showing what healing can look like.
All episodes of “Tiny Beautiful Things” come to Hulu Friday, April 7.