The Making of a Writer: One Letter at a Time
Let me begin at the end.
If you are reading this, it is because I just wrote a book. My first in 72 years. I wrote it because my husband died. Like all deaths of loved ones, the loss left me flailing, incapable of imagining life without him, unable to let him go. So, I began writing to him. Every morning. For years. Like Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, I believed he was still there. Writing is one way of turning horror into redemption. I was writing to my husband to honor him, to make meaning out of chaos.
But how did I become a writer in the first place?
I am the eldest child and only daughter of a reading specialist and an inveterate salesman. She loved great literature, and he understood the power of words to seduce and persuade. By fourth grade I was churning out stories hatched in my imagination and filling my diaries with entries fascinating only to me. “Your daughter is a writer,” the teacher told my mother.
At age 12, my first summer away from my family, nervous and homesick, I wrote daily detailed letters to my parents, chronicling my every activity at summer camp. Letter-writing became the antidote to separation anxiety. Miss somebody? Write a letter!
My third year at camp I became the Jungle Jingler, assigned to write rhyming jingles about life at camp. Jungle was the name of my bunk—what else could they call a cabin full of hormone-cursed 14-year-old girls just getting their periods? Including me. The day I ran sobbing into the infirmary asking for a Kotex you can be sure my parents got an extra letter in clinical, painstaking detail—especially the one to my mother, marked confidential--whereas the one to my father referred cagily to “my time of the month.”
In graduate school at Penn, I began hiding behind five-syllable words and rarely, to the chagrin of my professors, used anything shorter. But I also understood by then that the power of words and the power of cogent thought were mutually reinforcing. I had mastered synthetic reasoning and used it effectively in my writing about Modern European History. I thought I was becoming a scholar, destined for the halls of academe.
I had also fallen head over heels in love with an aspiring medical student, not yet my husband, and when I traveled to France alone to pursue graduate study during the summer of 1973, my letter-writing to my future husband surpassed anything I wrote at summer camp in length, frequency, and unremitting detail. I had to use air mail paper, like writing on a tissue. Herb would propose to me by the end of the summer. Was it the letters?
Eventually I landed back at Springside School, my alma mater, for a twenty-year stint as Director of Admission, where I could be both my mother and father: an educator and a salesman. The work suited me perfectly because there were admission acceptance letters to write. Heart-rending, truth-telling letters to parents of three-year-olds persuading them to choose Springside School for the next fourteen years in a crowded field of expensive elite private schools in Philadelphia. Letters in which the child was seen, valued, and well-matched to a rigorous college preparatory curriculum. A brilliant teacher and colleague taught me to observe the children so closely during their visits that I discovered a profound truth about writing: great writing begins with great seeing.
By the end of my career, I’d written thousands of letters. It wasn’t just that the children enrolled in the school. It was that the parents saved my letters and trotted them out years later to show me that almost everything I foretold came true. A three-year-old’s play preference, such as being drawn to a stethoscope, ropes, and pulleys, often led to a lifelong interest in medicine, physics or engineering. A child who displayed empathy when another child cried would remain emotionally intelligent into adulthood, finding her way into mental health or pastoral care. Emotional forecasting was part of my work, and it was authenticated in the letters—another kind of love letter, it turned out.
But it was the untimely and tragic death of my husband that would unleash my passion for letter-writing as never before. Every day after he died could not begin without a fulsome letter as I filled book after book after book until one day I thought, I really am a writer. It happened when I realized my letters were no longer just for my husband but would become a narrative that grappled with universal questions about loss, aging, resilience and trust—even motherhood.
And Always One More Time is my new beginning. Excerpts have appeared in The Metaworker Literary Magazine, NextTribe, Oldster Magazine, the Daring to Tell podcast, and in two essays on memoir revision for Brevity Blog.
Will you join me?
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