Not Your Typical Adaptation: A Conversation Between Past and Present with ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ Creator Liz Tigelaar

This interview was conducted in April 2023.

Based on the best-selling collection by Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things follows Clare (Kathryn Hahn) a floundering writer who becomes a revered advice columnist while her own life is falling apart.

Liz Tigelaar's latest adaptation deftly examines and navigates uncharted waters with volcanic sadness front and center. And rightly so, it is not your typical adaptation of a book that is not your typical memoir. The nuances of life, the unexpected life events, and the change of daily routines, all the while grieving and healing are displayed in this Eight Episode mini-series. Whatever your relationship is, may have been or may not have been, with your mother - it surely leaves you with a new perspective. 

Back in March, while attending the SXSW Film Festival, I had the grand opportunity of attending a live panel with both Liz and author Cheryl Strayed, expertly moderated by Variety's Co-Editor-in-Chief Cynthia Littleton. Witnessing firsthand their respect and love for each other, the respect of the material and the deep connection they had to both the book and the show, was pretty profound. It just made diving into this particular interview with Liz, much more personally exciting for me.

Liz Tigelaar shares with Script the impact of the writers' room having direct access to author Cheryl Strayed to mine stories from, important factors when building the writers' room, what inspired her to become a writer, and so much more!

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: What was the experience like, especially for your writers to have direct access to author Cheryl Strayed?

Liz Tigelaar: I mean, when I was first staffing the room, I was so excited to tell people, ‘And Cheryl Strayed's gonna be here! This is gonna be a humongous draw.’ Because not only is it Cheryl, it's also you’re sitting in the room with Dear Sugar. And you spend a lot of time talking about your life in the room. So, I'm like, ‘Who gets this?’ So, I was so excited about it. And it's funny, because we've talked about it. She said, ‘Were people trepidatious?’ And I'm like, ‘Maybe people were. I don't know.’ There is always that fear with the author that like, ‘Would we need to watch what we say, because we're dissecting the story?’ But this was so different, because it wasn't like a narrative story laid out in this linear way. So, we kind of had a different role as kind of anthropologists - look at this and dissect it and make something new out of it. And it was so advantageous to have Cheryl there.

There were so many times where she would tell us something, and then we'd start working. And then we'd get ourselves kind of twisted up in knots. And just the normal way you do in a room where you're like, ‘Where are we going?’ You're kind of walking around blind. And then we'd say, ‘Cheryl, tell us one more time, what really happened?’ And then she would tell us and we would just think, ‘Oh my gosh, we have to do that!’ Some examples would be like the underwear - she'd never written about that. She said, ‘After my mom died, we had to pick out clothes to bury her. And we forgot to bring underwear. And it led to this whole thing of we couldn't have an open casket if she wasn't wearing underwear, which is so ridiculous, because it's not like she's going to be seen in her underwear.’ So, it set them off on this journey. They didn't have time to go all the way back home. They had to go to a drugstore, they had no money and they had to find whatever underwear they could. And that sparked this story. And so, we talked about the link of underwear and past and present and this idea of freedom and how you sleep at night. And how could we utilize Water's Edge, the retirement home? It's so fun to have things start to come together like that.

And the same thing happened in Episode Four. We were talking about faith and where her mom's faith came from and how she was kind of excommunicated from the church for getting a divorce. And we were trying to think how could we kind of articulate the story, we've gone through so many different stories and had stories in a church and then Cheryl just said, ‘My mom used to do this thing, because we didn't have electricity, where she took us out into a field at night, and we'd sleep under the stars,’ like the summer solstice, ‘and these horses would come.’ And we were like, ‘Wow we're doing that!’ [laughs] And Cheryl's like, ‘It was only two horses.’ And I'm like, ‘We'll do ten!’ [laughs] ‘We need all the horses!’ So that made it really fun.

And we constantly had Sugar to mine in real-time. And I honestly can't imagine having done it without her. She was so vital. It wasn't just like her book that was vital - she as Cheryl, as Sugar. With her whole life inside of her was just so vital to do this. I think that's why it's so, I hope, singular and beautiful. That’s her.

Sadie: Oh, totally. Just from what I witnessed from your conversation at South by – her presence is very calming, and with every little word, moment, and silence, we all just hung on to it. What was your approach, alongside your writers’ room, in breaking episodes from the Bible itself – the book?

Liz: It was interesting. We had a Zoom room, and I'm a person who puts everything up on boards. And it was so challenging to not have a physical board to write on. I realized that my brain almost couldn't work that way. So, it was really practically difficult in some weird way in a Zoom room world. Because the book didn’t lay out into some obvious way to tell the story - I felt like it kind of took the handcuffs off a little bit for what the series could be, because the book is not like anything else to adapt. It's a half hour, but it's not a typical half hour. It's a memoir, but it's not a typical memoir. It's a nonlinear memoir. And it's not really even billed as a memoir. And so, it had all these elements, and that was the biggest thing was to just start figuring out how to approach it.

I think talked about this on the panel, but I felt like in some ways, you read the book, in the most obvious ways, if you were going to do her story and were going to do the letter writer story, ad it's going to be about her relationship to how she finds these answers, kind of in the present to how to answer these people in the present. But I was so enamored with Cheryl's story that I'm like, ‘But there's this whole past and the past is how she finds answers.’ She needs answers in the present. She finds the answers from the stories of her past. I mean, that's what Sugar does. And so, it's like, OK, well, that is so fundamental to the book. Now, how do we translate that?

So, it became this conversation between past and present. And it started to become this idea of how time intertwines, and how you can go back to the stories of your past to look for answers in the present. And by doing that, you can also heal something in the present that makes you think about those stories differently. So, it's like an adult grown up, Clare can go back into her past and interact with her past selves, but in the present, we can also see how her past selves manifest, and that sometimes she can feel like her 16-year-old self all of a sudden again, or her 11-year-old self, or 22-year-old self.

All these were kind of concepts that I was excited to explore and figure out, ‘OK, well, how can this translate into like a language of the show?’ I mean, it felt ambitious. And then I think we didn't want to be formulaic. A typical premise pilot is like, by the end, she 100% knows, of course, she's Sugar! And on some level, she does know that she's Sugar, but she's not ready to step into it yet. And there's so much truth in Cheryl's writing, that we wanted that same truth to translate. And sometimes in TV, there are just certain TV rules that I mean, it's been ingrained in me that you're like, ‘Well, that's a TV show. That's a premise pilot. Of course, she has to say that.’ And it's like, but what if she didn't? What if it just felt a little more like life, where we told the story of how she really came to accept it? Like if one is kind of the invite of the call to action, and a knowing that, like, ‘Oh my god, I'm not going to be able to not do this.’ That episode can be, what is the journey to knowing, ‘Oh, I must do this.’ Choosing rather than falling into it.

We tried to kind of explore it that way. Not every episode had to have an answer to the letter, not every episode had to have a letter - a lot did. They could be used in different ways. And so, I think it was just almost acknowledging the boundaries of TV and then thinking, ‘Well, can we push some of those things a little?’

Sadie: I love that. And that her book is not a typical memoir - it's breaking all the rules and that's what you get to do with this show, too. You’ve gotta know the rules first so that you can break them and have fun with it.

Liz: Totally! And I think it is so important to know the rules, so you know when you're breaking them. [laughs]

Sadie: In terms of your writers' room, what were you looking for in writer voices to round out this world?

Liz: First and foremost, just people, writers who could connect to the material on multiple levels. When I built the Little Fires writers' room, it wasn't like, ‘You're here to do this one thing, you're here to be the voice of this one thing,’ it was more like, you're here to bring every part of yourself to any part of this, that resonates for you. And so, I think I wanted to do a very similar thing with Tiny Beautiful Things, keeping in mind, obviously, things that are so important to our writers’ room, in terms of diversity of voice; be it race, age, sexual orientation, gender, all of that. And to say, let's have a room of really different perspectives.

And one of the biggest things I think I looked at was people's relationship to grief and loss, their relationship to their own mothers, or to being mothers, or to not being a mother. And so that ended up becoming a really big piece of the puzzle. I didn't interview like a million writers for the show, but it was a good number of people of all levels. I can think of two examples of really wonderful people who I would have loved to hire who just said, ‘This is too much right now, for me. I would love to be in this room, but I can't sit in this room and talk about this right now.’ And I knew for some people whose stories and lives I knew, because there's some people that I've worked with before, this could either be incredibly healing, or it could be way too much at the moment. So normally that's not something that really plays into the room.

But this was, and I think, one of our writers, Ellen Fairey said something, because there's such a downside of being on Zoom, as we all know, and upsides [laughs] she said, ‘I think the protection of Zoom may have allowed people to be more open and vulnerable, because there was still a little barrier, and so you maybe felt safe to say something, and you could always turn your camera off, or take a minute. It wasn't like you were kind of stuck sitting in the room with the weight of your own emotions.’

And I think it really asked people to go very deep. The show is about someone who's very broken, and it requires you to go and explore your own kind of broken places. And it's not easy. And this was a group that really did it and came together so nicely and was just full of different perspectives.

Sadie: Just gotta give you kudos in that you were fully aware of those vulnerabilities going into this – you want to hire a specific writer but respecting their boundaries, that’s huge. I could only assume how heavy that room could get at times. But the beauty of Zoom and that layer.

Liz: We were all crying all the time. There was a lot of crying. I think what the show is also exploring is this idea and I mean, Kathryn Hahn has said this many times that we're all taught to be society ready. [laughs] Fit for society. Everybody has a volcanic sadness in them. Everyone has dealt with some kind of loss or trauma or something that they still are grappling with. And we don't see that. We all put ourselves together, nobody's seeing that like 15 minutes before you got to the place where you're gonna go where you put a smile on your face, and you were literally freaking out and fighting with your spouse and you don't see that because we all quickly pull ourselves together to cover it. And you're in a room, you have to be able to show all that to each other.

Sadie: Did you implement any kind of writing exercises to make that Zoom environment feel like a safe space?

Liz: We didn't necessarily have exercises. Though Cheryl has really great writing prompts when she does workshops, that would have in retrospect, been really fun to do in this group. But my big thing is, how do you get people comfortable fast? Because in the writers’ room, you only have a certain amount of weeks, you're like there for four months or however many 20 weeks, and you're like, ‘we got to do this quick.’ We can't spend two months getting to know each other. We got to dive in.

What I did in this room on the first day is, I just said, ‘I want everyone to go around the room and tell a story about the worst TV room they have ever been in and why.’ Total code of silence, nobody's gonna tell, but really, what is the most fucked up TV room you've ever been in? [laughs] Because one, it gives me an idea of what was fucked up to people. And I will make sure not to do that - just practically. And then two it starts this instant camaraderie. And of course, by the time we finished, Cheryl was terrified because she had never been in a TV room before. So, I managed to scare the shit out of her. [laughs] But what ended up happening is people were like, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, I know that guy!’ And so, you end up just getting in there quickly.

I think after the first couple of weeks, Cheryl was like, ‘Are we actually making any progress? Or are we just kind of talking about ourselves?’ And I'm like, ‘No, no, I know, it seems like we're not making any progress, because we're talking about ourselves. But we're developing something that's going to come to play quickly into the stories.’ So, I think it's kind of fostering that. And then we did do some things with actors on set in terms of more workshop-type things, but the writers are prepared to dive in quickly. I mean, they know the drill. [laughs]

Sadie: [laughs] What inspired you to become a storyteller and find your way into writing for TV?

Liz: I would say, my mom. I wanted to be a soap opera actress on Days of Our Lives. [laughs] That was my high school goal. I was like, 'Someday, when I'm on Days of Our Lives, I'll be married, but also make out with people because it's my job.’ [laughs] This is my, like, 16 -ear-old idea. Acting is not what I'm good at. And I went to college, and I needed to pick a concentration, and I had no idea what to pick. And my mom said - I wasn't really like a great writer, I didn't particularly do well…and my mom is a wonderful writer and a wonderful reader, and she was a bookbinder - and she said, ‘You love telling stories, why don't you try to do that?’ So, I was like, ‘OK.’ So, I did.

I moved out to LA, and my first job was on Dawson's Creek. And that was kind at the time when Dawson's Creek was at its most Dawson's Creek. [laughs] It was right after the first season, those first 12 or 13 episodes premiered, and suddenly, everybody was on TV Guide, and it was like a phenomenon. And so, I started working there. And it was incredible. Mike White was on staff, Greg Berlanti was a staff writer. I mean, you couldn't believe the group. A lot of my closest writer friends, we were all assistants or writers on that show way back in the late 90s, I guess. Geez. [laughs] And that really started the journey.

But a show called American Dreams was my first staff job. And that was the show that I became a writer on and just had such an amazing relationship to especially all the younger people on that show, because they were all young and didn't want their parents around. So, I'd always get pulled out of the writers’ room to chaperone them, take them to the American Music Awards. I was like the adult in charge. And I was like, ‘This is great. Writing in Hollywood is great!’ So, it was fun. It seems long ago. But it kind of started there.

And I was lucky enough to have really great mentors. A mentor named Josh Reims, and of course, Winnie Holzman and work my way up. It feels really weird to be here, because I still feel so young. [laughs] Like every time they write about me, they're like, ‘veteran showrunner’ and I'm like veteran showrunner?! I've only run like three or four shows, I don't know, veteran? I'm like, we're too dramatic with this language. Maybe like ‘decent’ or like ‘nice.’ Baby to veteran, it just seems a little harsh. [laughs]

Sadie: [laughs] Yeah, how about working mom who runs shows?

Liz: Yeah, working mom. How about that! [laughs]

Sadie: Well a big thanks to your mom for putting the bug in your ear. It's one of those scenarios where you shake your fist at your mom because she always knew and was right.

Liz: She knew! I mean, she always tells people, ‘We just thought she'd be living in our basement’ and we didn't even have a basement [laughs] so I don't even know what she was talking about. But I'm like, ‘What are you talking about?’ [laughs]

Sadie: [laughs] High standards much, mom? Well, I think it’s all well deserved - you definitely put it in the work to get to this point in your career. With the adaptation of novels, especially in the TV space rather than films, I sense that there’s more creative liberation when in that adaptation process – you get to explore more and expand these worlds.

Liz: I love it. I love adaptations. I mean, even after I did, Life Unexpected, my first show, I remember being like, ‘Well…that was my idea. That's it!’ [laughs] I have to do this again? I have to think of something else? That was the one! [laughs] And it feels like book adaptations - I've delightfully fallen into it - where I'm like, this author has thought of all these things. But it like really suits my personality, because like I said, I like to put everything up. I have a very like, I'd like to say it's like Beautiful Mind, but it's probably more like Claire Danes in Homeland [laughs] and like a drug induced state where I have some murder board up…but I love a murder board. So, anything I can put up, and piece together - it's like a puzzle. And I love the puzzle of it. And I love taking something that's in one medium and figuring it out.

Even with Little Fires, that was like, ‘OK, well, what stories in here haven't been told? Elena's character had a whole backstory that wasn't really in the book. But there were little lines here and there that you could start to piece together and be like, OK, let's take those puzzle pieces, and now, let's create this whole backstory that's going to infuse this whole other thing. Now we get a whole episode to bring it out. And like I get so excited about those things. The stories in the spaces that you just wouldn't get to necessarily have time for in a book, but the things that seem so obvious and Little Fires, it seems so obvious to me that Izzy was gay. And Celeste [Ng] was like, ‘Yes, I was thinking that, but I felt like I didn't have time to go off on that story.’ And I'm like, ‘Well, good news. We have eight episodes!’ So that's so much fun.

And I feel like the same with Cheryl. We could go inside the stories. We knew to find the stories that you may not know about her essay “The Love of My Life,” she was going to publish that somewhere else and they wanted her to take all the sad out of it. And she decided not to, and she published it with The Sun. But in our story, she did take the sad out. And what did removing something so vital leave in her? It felt like selling out, you know? And that contributes to not being where you want to be so it's like you're able to take these things and manipulate them a little bit, and tell these kinds of ghost ship stories if you will. So that's been really fun. I love adaptations. I'm so grateful for novels and whenever a good one comes my way.

Sadie: I hope more keep coming your way! In the spirit of Dear Sugar and Clare and her journey in herself through her 16-year-old self and so on, and finding the answers to her questions, what would you tell your 22-year-old self?

Liz: Well, my advice always is don't just sunscreen your face. Sunscreen your neck and the back of your hands, because I feel like I wish someone had told me that a little sooner. And my dad was a dermatologist. Maybe he told me that, but it didn’t really stand out. But I think what I would say to my 22-year-old self is like, two things; one is to embrace your questions, it's actually exciting to have questions, because later in life, you will get a lot of answers. You'll still of course have a million questions, but you'll get a lot of answers. And you'll miss the time, when so many things were undecided, and you had all these paths to go down.

And then I would also say - this is more specifically for women - I would say stop worrying who's going to love you and be consumed with who's going to love you and when you're going to X, Y, and Z and all these things that society stamps you as you are validated as a woman now because you got married, had kids, whatever. And I would say throw that out the window and do what you love. Do not worry about it. Worrying about it doesn't make it happen anyway. And what brings people to you is when you do what you love, and that's how you find more of what you love. So, focus on what you love. That's what I would say.

Tiny Beautiful Things is available to watch on Hulu.