Books and readers

“Once a reader finds that author and that book,” John Cole explains, “something remarkable occurs. Readers discover themselves within the pages of the book, and they begin to feel and understand.”

Letters to authors

Cole is the Director and Founder of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. Each year, Cole and others in the Letters About Literature program receive letters from young readers in grades 4 through 12—letters they’ve written to authors living or dead in which they describe how their books have changed their view of the world or themselves. A collection of those letters was published this year in a book called, Journeys: Young readers’ letters to authors who changed their lives, edited by Catherine Gourley (Candlewick Press, 2017).

Spiritual connections

What struck me about the letters was how young readers expressed ways that particular books connected them spiritually (1) to themselves, (2) to something greater than themselves, and (3) to others. For example,

To Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried

Two years a go, when I was a sophomore in high school, my mom had a sudden heart attack while running. She collapsed on the side of the road. My English class read The Things They Carried a few months later.

What I expected was just another book about war. What I found was a message that spoke directly to my soul. Why are death, war, and loss such taboo subjects? Why must we bury them down deep inside, cover our fears and uncertainties with a strained smile and ignore a whole part of ourselves?

Your book came when I feared that real pain and heartache were foreign to everyone but me. It came when I needed it the most.  You helped me see that I am not alone.

To Elie Wiesel, author of Night

Your story has given me a way to connect with a family history that I have not lived but that is a part of me.

To Kristin Levine, author of The Lions of Little Rock

I told my library teacher all of the things I learned from your book.

Books as sacramental objects

Most poignantly, some of the letters draw on special memories of sharing books and reading time with loved ones, a mom or dad. Books that are most cherished in this way can even become sacramental objects by the way they keep relationships alive with loved ones who have died. For example,

To Dr. Seuss, author of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

About a month ago, my mother passed away with brain cancer. We read One Fish, Two Fish so many times, I can’t imagine how she didn’t feel as if she had written it herself, but the funny pictures, the made-up words, the voice—it made us both escape into a place we couldn’t explain.

Whenever I miss my mom, I can read it and remember the way her voice sounded and how safe and warm we felt with each other and the way she’d fall asleep on my bed sometimes if we read late enough. Even if I can’t be with her, I can still turn to what we both held on to. I’ll always have that.

Real feelings, fake letters

While the feelings expressed by the young readers in their letters are surely genuine, and emotionally moving to read, the letters themselves, of course, are fake. They were written with the authors in mind but not to each author directly.

Real letters, mixed feelings

In Journeys there is a letter written to J. D. Salinger about The Catcher in the Rye. Unfortunately, if it had ever been a real letter, Salinger never would have read it. The famous recluse prohibited his publisher from forwarding fan mail to him.  In a piece for Slate, Joanna Rakoff recounted what it was like to be one of “Jerry’s gatekeepers.”

Every day, a bundle of mail was dropped on my desk by the office secretary, much of which consisted of letters addressed to Salinger. The letters came from Sri Lanka or the Netherlands or Arizona. They included deeply personal admissions—cancer diagnoses, bankruptcy, divorce—and were often written in Salinger’s own brash style or, at the very least, incorporated the slang of the period he chronicled. “Dear Jerry, you old bastard,” they tended to start. “I gotta tell you. The Catcher in the Rye is one helluva goddamn book.” . . .

But as the months wore on, I found myself increasingly unable to ignore the raw emotion of the letters. Even the angry teens struck a chord with me. These were not letters that the writers had tossed off carelessly, but notes that had clearly been written and rewritten, until just the right tone was struck. How could I simply throw them away? I began sending them personal letters telling them how much we appreciated hearing their stories and explaining, more gently, that we were prohibited from sending Salinger his mail, but we so often wished that we could.

Conversely, Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) did read her fan letters from students. Then she tossed them in the trash. In her piece “On Fans and Fan Mail” reprinted in Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings (2015), and excerpted in The New Yorker (Aug 1, 2015), she bemoaned,

Someday the English teachers of the world are going to be made to suffer for what they do to writers. Every spring—which is term paper time—I get, and every other writer I know gets, twenty or thirty letters, all of one kind. They vary only in the degree of misspelling, and they typically read:

Dear Miss Jackson,

Our high school English class is doing a term paper on its favorite authors. You are my favorite author, so will you please tell me the names of all your books and your best known stories and any television plays or movies you have written and also I would like to know your theories about writing and in general what you are trying to say. Also what you find in your daily life that you can use in books and stories and your likes and dislikes in other writers and if possible a small autographed picture of yourself and anything else you think may be of help to me in my paper. My paper has to be handed in this coming Friday, so I would appreciate a quick reply to this letter. Yours very truly.

Still, she concluded her piece with two (maybe her only two) favorite fan letters. The first one wasn’t even sent to her, she said, but to a friend of hers who wrote children’s books. It reads:

Dear Sir,

I like to read a lot of books but every time I find one I like best and write the author a letter it turns out he is dead. If you are not dead will you please answer this? I love you.

“Sadly enough,” Jackson says, “it was signed only ‘Linda’ and gave no address.”

The point

Writing to authors can be complicated. But that’s not the point. The point of Journeys is that its collection of imaginary letters to real authors about their life-changing books opens a window into the lives of young people. According to its editor, Rachel Gourley, among the letters received from students in the Letters About Literature program are many from teachers as well. Teachers write to express how they have learned more about their students from this activity of letter writing than from any other.

Naturally, through this window, older book-loving readers like me, and maybe you, can see and learn more about themselves as well.

What would you want to say to the author of the one book in particular that changed your life as a child?

For me, I’d want to tell Richard Bach, author of Illusions: The adventures of a reluctant messiah, how his spiritual barnstorming philosophy lifted me through some pretty harsh reality on the ground as a teenager and shaped my life ever since.

Gourley, C. (ed.) (2017). Journeys: Young Readers’ Letters to Authors Who Changed Their Lives. Somerville, Mass: Candlewick Press.

Jackson, S. (2015). “On fans and fan mail.” In Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings. New York: Random House. Repr. The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/on-fans-and-fan-mail

Rakoff, J. (2010). Dear Jerry, You Old Bastard: My adventures answering J.D. Salinger’s mail. Slate http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2010/02/dear_jerry_you_old_bastard.html