I’m in an Epistolary Mood

I just finished reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (or The Guernsey whatever whatever, as I like to refer to it).  For all my teasing about the unwieldy title, it’s a wonderful book, partially because it’s involving and moving and entertaining, but also because in many ways it’s a book about loving books.  The story is in fact kicked off by someone asking for help in finding a good bookstore (there are none where he lives). 

While the novel isn’t exactly about the bookstore, the brief references to it in passing conjure up exactly the kind of Platonian ideal of a bookstore Kim and I have in mind as we seek out different places to write about.  The bookseller cares about what his clients want to read.  He’ll search not only his own stock for a book, but, if it’s not there, he’ll start writing letters to other stores and sources to find it.  And I believe that this particular bookseller doesn’t even wait for payment before sending out the book once he has it because he knows how eager the seeker is to start reading.

While I don’t expect booksellers today to start handing out free books, I do feel like there are plenty of wonderful bookstore owners out there who are really doing it for the love of books and who are happy to go the extra mile to help you find what you’re looking for–or find what you didn’t even KNOW you were looking for.  Which is why we started this blog–to salute those dedicated bookish types.

Now, the other thing about The Guernsey whatever whatever is that it’s an epistolary novel.  (And if you think it’s easy to spell epistolary, then I encourage you to try doing it yourself without looking. )  You don’t see a lot of epistolary novels these days, maybe because people don’t write a lot of letters these days.  Well, not on paper anyway. 

I was recently asked to contribute a blog on blogging as part of a promotion for my novel.  The assignment was a bit vague–I was just asked to talk about blogging from an author’s viewpoint.  For some reason that got me thinking about writing to authors and how, when I was a kid (and even into early adulthood), I tried several times to contact authors which was incredibly hard to do back then: you had to write a letter to the publishing house and hope they’d forward it to the author.  And what were the odds that the author, assuming she even received your letter, would actually have the time and inclination to sit down and write you a letter back? (She’d have to pay for postage, too.)  I knew how hard it was for me to write a simple thank you note to my grandmother for her birthday check–I didn’t have high hopes that anyone was likely to write me a real letter.

A couple of authors did, though.  Michael Bond, who wrote the Paddington books, not only sent me a handwritten letter, but also a little drawing of Paddington (probably reproduced, but still exciting for a little girl) that my mother framed and put up in my room for me.  Many years later, I wrote to Tanith Lee, a wonderful British fantasy writer, and either I wrote the world’s greatest letter or she’s the most generous person in the world (all right, it’s the latter) but she not only wrote me back but sent me some advance copies of her latest books. I still remember how blown away I was when I got that package.

Times have changed.  Now that virtually every author out there has a website and/or a blog, you can contact almost anyone you want with little more than a click and a few hastily typed lines.  It’s wonderful from an author’s perspective because I love to hear from people who’ve read my books.  I’ve had people from many different countries e-mail me through my website, especially about the autism book. Often they don’t have services available about autism where they are and the fact they can contact me that easily opens worlds of information to them.

So I’m a fan of e-mail.  Kim and I wouldn’t be the close friends we are today if we weren’t both such insanely addicted e-mailers (who also hate using the phone).  We agreed early on that we weren’t likely to set up play dates for our kids with any mother who wasn’t willing to make the arrangments by e-mail.  It was just too much work to try to track someone down on the phone and make all the small talk you have to if you reach them. 

But the question is, have we lost something by making correspondence so quick, so easy, so ultimately trivial?   I send out dozens of quick e-mails every day.  They’re here one second and they’re gone.  But letters, real letters–those you save and reread and cherish.  My grandmother wrote letters to us every summer when we were away from her (the rest of the year we lived nearby).  I have them all saved up and once went through them and typed up all my favorite parts to share with the rest of the family.  No one is saving my e-mails.  Nor should they–they’re sloppy, to the point, and hastily written.

People have tried to bring the epistolary novel into the 21st century by having them be e-mail or i.m. based.   But it’s not the same.  The long wonderful history of the epistolary novel, from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society depends on the idea that when people sit down to write letters, they’ll write at length with attention to detail, phrasing, and introspection.  That the story moves forward is incidental.  E-mails are not the descendants of letters; they are the descendants of notes, those hastily scrawled little lines you might leave on someone’s doorstep to say you dropped by or to remind someone to pick up some milk. 

Is letter writing a dead art?  What do you think?  And could someone still write a really good epistolary novel set in the present day or would it simply be unbelievable?