Jennifer's Reviews > The Correspondent

I both hope and fear I will find myself Sybil in thirty years. In many ways, I recognize her in me now. Her love of letters and books; her intensity; her frankness in naming truths that feels brazen but is anything but. In the ways feeling misplaced as a child, and later losing a child, changes a person—instills a caution that leaves one fearfully withholding, however unintended. And how that hurts the ones we love most, especially our other children. How difficult it is to come to that realization. How everything changes, unfurls, and comes bursting forth afterward.

How much we put in writing for a recipient no longer there to receive.

Her letter to Larry McMurtry about a book so dear to me, and his in return, left me weeping. That he wrote and signed his reply on Christmas Eve, as I write this review on Christmas Eve, felt eerily prescient.

”I want to tell you about my experience with having read Lonesome Dove. I have read the book now three times…

…I happened to read Lonesome Dove during a stretch of my life when I felt that everyone around me was rising up to the fullness of themselves, while I was withering.

And I will never forget the first time reading that book. It seemed to me that the text was tapping down into some ancient, painful stream of truth.

…I remember reading that book and getting into, oh, I don’t know, the last hundred pages perhaps, when you see as a reader that you are not in for a happy or neat ending for any one of the characters of which you have grown so fond. You’re in for a hard ending, and you rather know that you are, I think. Or at least, I did.

…I was sitting there thinking, 'Here in my hands is a book about disappointment.' Disappointment for every one of these people. Wretched, bitter disappointment.

And I was angry, of course. But it was really that I was dismayed by your mercilessness, the way you dished out blow after blow, refusing to yield even a little and provide the reading population with a sense of relief in any measure. It was agonizing because it felt so true to the experiences of my own life. And I suppose back then I was reading fiction in search of assurances that there was still reason for hope.”

I hope, at seventy-nine, I am not writing letters of regret and sorrow for all I withheld. My grandmother died an agonizing death, haunted by the things she never made right. Like Sybil, I suppose that’s why I’ve turned heavily to fiction now: to seek truth I might not otherwise see; to feel and witness regret in others, while there is still time to choose differently and prevent my own. I keep reading, keep writing, in search of assurances that there is still reason for hope.