athenenoctua11 's review for:

Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker

4.0

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Loved the language Mary-Louise Parker juggles here like she couldn't juggle in drama school. There are some sentences here and there that just take your breath away: they're so original yet simple, as though any of us could have got there but none had the insight to do so. Some of the letters are deeply moving, like the birth of her son, the one that is for her daughter even though it's disguised as being for the daughter's future husband, and of course the last one about her dad. There are some moments of brilliant humor too.

Most of the letters are cryptic but you can still guess who she meant as the Risk Taker (it's got Bruce Springsteen written all over it, imho) or who she wrote about in the middle of the Dear Nasa letter (just a guess). Some letters felt a little whimsical, like the joys of countryside and the neighbour, that one about the mexican boy that danced... It was a bit textbook "look how artsy and cool I am" BUT the author did express great humility and self-awareness and pure emotion in many of these letters. I once did a similar exercise, where I'd write a sentence about people in my life anonymously and, while it was fun, it felt incredibly self-indulgent. It felt like I was saying: look at all these people in my life, when in reality I felt quite alone and many of those people were in my past. So it's the format I have some issue with, not the content.