Diksha Sundriyal
Hulu’s ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ charts the tumultuous life of Clare Pierce. She is in couples therapy with her husband, Danny, who threw her out of the house after she gave their daughter’s college fund to her brother without discussing it. Her daughter, Rae, dislikes her, and every conversation between them ends with the teenager slamming a door in Clare’s face. Meanwhile, her professional life has not been faring well either.
Clare finds solace in the advice she writes for the column Dear Sugar in an online magazine. Initially, she considers herself unfit to advise anyone about anything. But when she sees a connection between other people’s experiences and her own, the retrospection allows her to help the readers and herself. This changes things in her marriage as well, which is on the brink of ending. SPOILERS AHEAD
Clare and Danny’s Divorced is Inevitable in Tiny Beautiful Things
When we meet Clare Pierce, her marriage is already on shaky grounds. She has been forced out of her own home, where she sneaks in like a burglar. She is forced to sleep in place of her employment, which worsens her situation. She also goes to couples therapy with her husband, making her feel worse. She feels like she is getting the short end of the stick in this situation and even assumes that Danny might be having an affair with the therapist.
Things get better for the couple when their therapist advises them to sleep with each other. They spend a lovely evening together, talking about things they hadn’t discussed in a very long time. At the end of the night, they have sex, and the romance in their relationship is rekindled. The wrench arrives when they order a cab, and the driver is the man Clare almost slept with when she was not living at her house.
The awkwardness between her and the driver tips off Danny. When he asks her about it, she changes the topic, not wishing the mistake to ruin things when they are finally getting better. Clare leaves for a writer’s retreat that weekend, and before coming back home, answers a reader’s letter, telling them to get out of their relationship because they don’t want to stay in it anymore. She talks about her first marriage and how she stayed in it even though she wanted to leave the moment she got married.
Clare writes that wanting to go should be reason enough for a person to leave their spouse. It’s fair advice and the one her husband takes, too. Unbeknownst to her, he had been reading Dear Sugar. When she comes back from the retreat, he sits her down and uses her words to tell her that he wants to end their relationship. Clare is taken aback, realizing her husband took her advice to break up with her.
Considering that things had been faltering between them for a long time, Danny decides that he is done with trying to keep it going. Even though Clare doesn’t confess, he knows what the weird vibe between her and the cab driver means. And even though things got strained between them after Clare gave Lucas the money, they had been deteriorating long before that. In the final episode, Clare reveals that her and Danny’s marriage is over, and because there is no scene that shows either of them trying to patch things up, it’s fair to assume that they are getting a divorce.
Did Cheryl Strayed Divorce Her Husband?
While Clare and Danny’s marriage comes to the brink of a divorce, Cheryl and her husband, Brian Lindstrom, have been going strong for more than two decades and a half now. The couple married in 1999, after four years of dating, and have two kids together. There might have been ups and downs in their relationship, but they have weathered through it and are still together.
‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ is partially based on the life of Cheryl Strayed, the real-life Dear Sugar advice columnist. She and Clare have the same backstory; however, when it comes to their adult lives, they are worlds apart. While adapting Strayed’s book, ‘Tiny Beautiful Things,’ creator Liz Tigelaar wanted to explore an alternate path for Claire, one that Strayed didn’t take. She wondered what Strayed’s life would’ve been like if she hadn’t made the choices that led her to her current life. What if things were more chaotic for her? This led to the creation of Clare.
Strayed confessed that while there are some similarities between her and the protagonist of the story, Clare’s “present-day life is not my life. The things that are happening in her marriage are not the things that are happening in my marriage; her child is not mine.” She said that while the show is “absolutely full of [her] heart,” it is mostly fictional when it comes to adult Clare.
Talking about Clare and Danny’s marriage in the Hulu series, Strayed said she used it to explore the complexities of relationships in middle age. “They’re finding the ground is shifting. Your 20s are that time when everything’s happening, but in your 40s and 50s, especially with a child about to leave the nest, [Clare and Danny] are starting to say: ‘What is next for me?’ And we’re not sure if they are going to include each other in that next chapter,” she said. This uncertainty between the couple keeps things interesting for the audience while raising questions about love, loyalty, and what it means to break up something that has been with you for a better part of your life.
Read More: Who is Cheryl Strayed’s Husband? How Many Kids Does She Have?
