Who Writes a Letter Anymore?

Yesterday’s Word Craft column in the Wall Street Journal was by Maria Semple, a novelist. Semple tells how she is writing an epistolary novel—a novel told in letters.

Who writes letters anymore, you ask? Not that many people. Even servicemen overseas use email, and more commonly Skype. Except for letters to the editor, and business correspondence, the last real letter I wrote was thirty years ago.

But this column comes to me at the right time, because I am reading an epistolary novel.

I talked about We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver in a previous blog post. It is a story told in letters from a woman to her estranged husband, some eighteen months after their son killed nine people in a high school rampage. The letters take the reader back to the beginning, when the couple were making the decision to have a child, and brings you through the raising of the child and events that all parents are familiar with, and some we’re not so familiar with (and some events we wished had never happened). The reader is taken through the novel from one point of view, that of the mother—at least that’s as far as I know, I’m a little over two-thirds of the way through and there have been a few surprises.

Semple’s novel, Where’d You go, Bernadette, is told through letter’s, too, but the correspondence comes through multiple characters and even police reports and other official documents. Sounds like fun, but remember that each different set of correspondence requires you to create different characters who think and write differently. That is a lot of work.

When it comes to epistolary stories, I have to mention the Griffin and Sabine series that came out in the early nineties. The correspondence is between two people who never met, told in postcards, notes and even letters that the reader takes out of an envelope and unfolds to read. There are multiple books in the series. I read only the first three and by the end I was freaked out.

Even my own novel, Rules for Giving, is epistolary in some places, in emails and text messages, and a letter from one of the characters. The electronic messages were easy, but the letter was tough. I agonized over it. The rest of the novel was told in first-person, but this letter reveals important information from another person’s point of view.

See ya’ later.

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