You've Got Mail

On (Rachel) Syme's Letter Writer & its many delights

Over the last week or so, I’ve been making my way through Syme’s Letter Writer, a book all about letter-writing by kindred spirit of the newsletter Rachel Syme. It’s been a treat top to bottom, featuring engaging and witty page layouts, at least one letter to the reader (folded into an envelope, no less!), personal and literary history, along with “you can definitely do this!” guidance for so many different types of letter.

The subtitle, too, is a rather disturbingly laser-accurate shot to this Dame’s heart: A Guide to Modern Correspondence About (Almost) Every Imaginable Subject of Daily Life, with Odes to Desktop Ephemera and Selected Letters of Famous Writers. The paragraphic yet breezy word count! The parenthetical aside! The enticement to admit Syme into the reader’s confidence as a trusted advisor on conjuring a bit of everyday magic that might have seemed as if it’s en route to becoming hopelessly archaic. So many of us maintain long-running correspondences with friends and family, and it’s really just a little hop or skip from texts and emails to reintroduce letter-writing (or postcard-writing – dream big, start small!) into your life.

If you already know Syme’s work from her days as Twitter’s Perfume Genie or The Dry Down, her fragrance newsletter with Helena Fitzgerald (both alluded to in her recent New Yorker piece on fall fragrances), you know her book’s vibe. It’s informed and playful, the rhetorical equivalent of an encouraging wave over to join her for a casually edifying little chat. Before you know it, you’re feeling encouraged not just to sit at Syme’s knee to soak up epistolary knowledge, but to give this lightly indulgent thing a try. And it is indulgent; I’m chuckling at myself a little for having purchased a guide to letter writing. I mean, I’ve been writing this newsletter for about ten years, and you have all accorded me and my Fellow Dames the kindness of inviting us into your inboxes to share our opinions about whatever we want every week. It’s pretty amazing! But I digress!

Indulging your own self a little bit, and bringing a small burst of joyful surprise to someone’s daily mail delivery is a small, special thing. It’s one way to create or strengthen the social glue so many of us long for and find in shorter-than-desirable supply. Your letter / note / postcard can be about anything, or about nothing at all, the postal equivalent of an enthusiastic hello from across the street. The point is mostly a reminder that you thought of them, and took the brief extra step of telling them they were in your thoughts. It’s inefficient, it’s nowhere near what we’d consider timely in comparison with every other popular mode of communication, it’s ephemeral, but while you have it, it’s tangible, too. And maybe you hang onto it. Maybe you hang it on the fridge, or tuck it away into a keepsake box, or use it as a bookmark.

Friends, I took a quick break from writing this very piece to write quick little letters to some other friends and have the following to report:

First of all, that was FUN. I feel linguistically limber and playful in a way I’ve been finding myself having to reach for more often than I’d like. I think I’ve found a new method of morning pages. Second, and also under the all-caps FUN umbrella, some lovely people who I love are going to get tiny treats in the actual USPS-delivered mail this week!

Third, what a reminder of how terrible my handwriting is. Wow. This is neither news nor unique to me, just the effect of decades of touch-typing. It did make me realize, though, that all the speedy typing I’m used to doing has created the correspondence equivalent of the excuse not to have friends over because your house is a mess. The thing about friends is, they know. They know about your piles of things and your dusty floors and whatever other visual evidence exists in your home that you, a person, live there, and in the main, they do not care. They love you, and they want to spend time with you.

If you wait until things look just right prior to inviting people over, you’re not going to see them as often as you and they would like. If I waited until my (historically quite terrible and now in obvious sharp decline) handwriting somehow magically got better prior to writing Dear Whoever, I’d never write a sentence. And who benefits in that scenario? No one! (Or everyone, who can say?) At least if I write something and it’s indecipherable, my friends know they have license to lovingly roast me about it and to ask for clarification, which I will happily provide (assuming I can decipher my own handwriting, a not-insignificant gamble).

I’ll leave you with a handful of related links, and a request to share your thoughts & memories about letter-writing:

• In my teens in the 1990s, I was obsessed with the Griffin and Sabine books by Nick Bantock. It’s a series about an epistolary romance between two people who live on opposite sides of the world, one in England, the other on an island in the Pacific. Or maybe one of them exists as a figment of the other’s imagination? And then maybe they become real? The books themselves are just the lovers’ letters and postcards, and I don’t think they could be published now due to how absurdly high the production costs would be. It’s packed with full-color everything and lots of fiddly bits like envelopes and their closures, but you can buy them used on sites like Abebooks (not a sponsored link, just my used bookstore of choice)

• Syme’s appearance at Books Are Magic to celebrate the release of her book, moderated by Slate’s film critic Dana Stevens

• If you start writing letters, you’re going to need stamps, and once again USPS has come through for us. They’ve got Betty White commemorative stamps; Lunar New Year stamps (you will simply never see a cuter snake), John Lewis stamps, even stamps featuring the 1774 plea from the colonies that eventually became the first 13 U.S. of A, “We ask but for Peace, Liberty, and Safety”. Truly, something for everyone. And that’s before you even look at the surprisingly well-priced clothing in their Gifts section!

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I have some thoughts about a couple of other cultural things that are resonant with this whole physical correspondence lark, but they’re still developing. I’ll write about them when my inchoate thoughts make the leap into slightly more choate-ness.

In the meantime, I’d love to know your feelings about letters — writing, receiving, reading those written by and to people who aren’t you — and any collections of letters you would recommend to a fellow letter afficcionado.