Memories of the Future

Letters of an examined life – letter #8

Writing is about connection. It is about finding those commonalities through shared experience. So when Lily Dunn and I discovered each other’s work we both thought: ‘now this is a woman I could sit down and chat with for hours over a bottle of wine’. Yet geography – the miles between us – made that impossible. So instead we committed to writing letters to one another, to discuss life, memoir, writing craft and more. And in this series, Memories of the Future: letters of an examined life, we have share those unedited – and often very personal – letters with you, our readers.

Lily published Letter #7 on her Substack on Wednesday, and you can catch up with that here – you may like to read it before reading my response, which includes an invitation to you as we take a short break.

Memories of the Future

And so to letter #8…

Dear Lily,

Thank you, as always, for your letter. There was so much buried in there – like treasure – for us to discuss, but first I want to tell you that last week I celebrated my birthday and the words that you wrote at the end of your letter were a gift. You said thank you, you said you had matured as a writer by writing to me, that you had found yourself claiming your space through these letters and I am so flattered that you would say that to me when I am such a great admirer of your work.

I too have enjoyed these letters so much, I have enjoyed the conundrums that you have presented to me each week about how and why and what we write. I live alone – except for my daughter and my menagerie of animals – and so I don’t have anyone to talk to about these subjects that go round and round in my head all day, and these letters have felt like an outlet for those thoughts. I have felt less lonely because of them, and they have also been an exercise, in the same way as a daily walk, or a weekly spin class – actually far more pleasant than a spin class! It has been good for my brain, so thank you too.

I love the Rachel Cusk quote, this idea that ‘darkness’ is both ‘aftermath and prelude’. I think we know that instinctively as humans, don’t we? That hard times are also points of growth, that the burning down of everything that we have known or come to rely on can be followed by rejuvenation – I wrote about this only this week actually, in my post about how lobsters grow. The only thing is that we can forget that in the moment, when all seems lost and we are lost within it – flailing – that the storms will settle, that there will be calm again. That order comes out of chaos, but that also chaos is inevitable, that it is necessary.

We have explored some of that chaos in these letters, and the readers of them have answered, sharing something of their own chaos – their own dilemmas – in the comments. It has felt such an honour to read the comments, to hear how our thoughts have resonated with many other people, those who are writing and those who aren’t. We are all navigating these questions we have about life and the people we share it with, and how our relationship to them and to memory matters, and how we – you and I – explore that through our writing craft.

Watching us correspond in this way has reminded others of the power and intimacy of letter writing. One of my friends sent me a text last week saying that she had been inspired by our letters to buy a cartridge pen and she is now penning a letter to me.

One of our readers wrote this on her notes referring to our letter: “I received a letter from my therapist nine years ago, with an invitation to reply, that letter still brings tears to flow so freely…”

Recently I watched Pachinko on Apple TV, I have been meaning to watching it for months and I have the novel sitting somewhere on my bookshelves. It is an inter-generational story of Koreans who made their lives in Japan – often against the odds – after the occupation in the early part of the 20th century. At the end of the series, there were interviews with some real-life characters who had moved over to Japan 60, 70, 80 years previously. One woman, now 95, thanked the filmmaker for hearing her story. “I’m sure it must have been very boring,” she said, “but thank you for listening.”

Oh, how I cried because of those few simple words. Don’t we all just want to be heard? Isn’t letter writing such an incredible way of offering someone that gift, that uninterrupted time to explore their own thoughts? By extension, by reading what they have written, you are telling someone that they are worthy of your time, that you believe in them, in their story, and their need to tell it.

The writer Zora Neale Hurston wrote regularly to her mentor Annie Nathan Meyer. Meyer supported Hurston throughout her whole career, and the writer remained deeply grateful to her for being that one person who believed in her: “I know that I can only get into the sunlight by work and only remain there by more work. But you do help me immensely,” she wrote. “It is pleasant to have someone for whom one thinks. It is mighty cold comfort to do things if nobody cares whether you succeed or not. It is terribly delightful to me to have someone fearing with me and hoping for me, let alone working to make some of my dreams come true.”

This is the power of letter writing.

That reader I mentioned wrote at the end of her note on Substack that she is now looking for a pen pal – she might even make herself known here, though I am conscious not to force her into the daylight. So while you and I take a short pause from our own letters to concentrate on other writing, don’t you think it would be nice to throw this open to others? Perhaps other people who are now searching or open to pen pals could write their names in the comments and find someone willing to write to them? Perhaps, through our letters, others could be connected in the same way, they could choose to share their letters too – wouldn’t that be wonderful?

In the words of Zora Neale Huston, it has been pleasant for me to have someone ‘for whom one thinks.’ Thank you Lily, and I look forward to a time in the Spring when we have some time to resume our letters to one another.

Thank you for being my pen pal and sharing some of your life with me,

With all love,

Anna

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