Yours Ever Read Free

are, for sure, plenty of flamboyant characters in the pages that follow—I wouldn’t trade Flannery O’Connor, FDR and Madame de Sévigné for any of the aforementioned three—but they are writing in a form, letters, that has been used by almost every literate person. If the material feels less rarefied than the diaries
in A Book of One’s Own
, it may also feel more welcoming and accessible. One common feature is indisputable: the pleasure to be had in violating someone’s privacy. Whether we’re reading his diaries or her letters, we’re reading material that wasn’t intended for us—at least originally.
    If this book seems less antic than the earlier one, so is the author finally publishing it. I was a young man when I wrote
A Book of One’s Own
, and while I’m fond of certain stretches, some overeager portions of it make me cringe a little, in the same healthy way one recoils a bit when rereading one’s own diaries—or letters. The chance to get your hands on the latter comes infrequently—perhaps when a lover throws them back in your face, or the parent who saved them dies—but if you don’t find the experience at least slightly mortifying, then something’s gone wrong with your growth.
    There’s a difference in the
reading
of diaries and letters, not just in the writing of them. From the first genre, one is getting the whole story; however selective, the diary is the total narrative that the author chose to provide. A letter is rarely more than half the story; if its forerunner or reply aren’t available, one has to infer the other half of the conversation, which can be as frustrating as listening to a cell-phone caller on the train. There are signs, however, that the genres are blending. The blog would seem to hover betweenthe two, as half diary, half letter-to-the-world, a sign that we are entering the post-private age at least partly of our own free will.
    For six months of the year 2000, when blogging barely had a name, a magazine editor named Paul Tough ran a website called Open Letters. As Dinitia Smith reported in
The New York Times:
“There was one from a man confronting his estranged wife, who was spending the night with another man; another from a 29-year-old woman having chemotherapy; and one from a well-known author who uses his bird feeders as a distraction from writing.” (How unexotic this already sounds in the age of YouTube and Wonkette!) The real sign that the era of the blog was being hatched came with Smith’s taking note of how “Some of the letters became mini-series that readers followed.”
    Yours Ever
is organized roughly around the circumstances motivating each chapter’s worth of letters. Life being the chaotic thing it is and letters being the associative catchall they are, there is nothing very categorical about the categories. The chapter divisions are, in fact, even more porous than they were in
A Book of One’s Own
, and aside from asking “How could you have left out …,” readers are entitled to object that some collection discussed in “Advice” really belongs in “Confession,” just as bits of “Friendship,” “Complaint,” “Love” and “War” may have strayed from their proper habitats. I can only reply that sorting the various bundles and collections has sometimes felt like herding cats.
    This judgmental survey is offered not as an exercise in nostalgia but a series of glimpses into a still-living literature. This is a book whose text bows down to its bibliography, one that presents itself as a kind of long cover letter to the cornucopia of titles listed back there. If, from what follows, a reader feels inspired to seek out any of those volumes, to consume them at length or in toto, I will have no cause to regret the anything-but-swift completion of my appointed rounds.
    Washington, D.C.
June 4, 2009
    * More or less foreseeing the telephone, Lamb writes that posting a letter is like “whispering through a long trumpet.”

CHAPTER ONE