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"Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator" by Arthur Herman
A revisionist biography argues that the red-hunting senator got a bum rap.
By Dante Ramos
[02/10/00]

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"Gertrude and Claudius" by John Updike
In his 19th novel, Updike spins a tale of feverish and furtive sex and death in a masterly prequel to "Hamlet."
By John Freeman
[02/09/00]

Ivory Tower
Buying time
Disability becomes fashionable among the prep-school set when it equals extra time on the SAT.
By Michael Scott Moore
[02/09/00]

Himmelfarb vs. the '60s
There's no room for real life in Gertie's America.
By Charles Taylor
[02/09/00]

Dear Mr. Blue
Faithful for now
Does my crush on another woman mean there's something wrong with my marriage?
By Garrison Keillor
[02/08/00]

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And I wasn't even dead!

After reeling with mixed astonishment and skepticism at the thought that I'd ever had "loves and adventures," I recovered enough to see that they wanted $125 for the packaged set. I then vacillated between feeling flattered that someone thought my old letters could fetch anything at all and insulted that my hopes and plans and loves and adventures -- whatever they might turn out to be -- amounted to a mere $125 on the open market.

Always up for an adventure, my boyfriend, Scotty (he comes after the marriage and divorce), called and spoke to the bookseller with a shameless pseudo-English accent, pretending to be a collector. The bookseller -- who you might think would be eager to unload an item with a vaguely sinister if not outright black-market provenance -- refused to negotiate or to sell the letters alone for a flat $100. But he was an amiable enough sort, and he was quick to reveal the source of the letters: my old college advisor.

Like anyone who’s ever discovered that a secret is out, I immediately started kicking myself: Why did I trust that guy? My advisor, now retired, had been the head of the writing program at State University of New York at Oswego. Formerly of the CIA or the Green Berets -- I forget which -- he taught his poetry class by reading our sonnets and villanelles out loud while slamming out the beat with a yardstick on his desk. Sometimes he would march in place at the same time. Why did I ever write letters about my loves and adventures to this lunatic?

I've decided that it had little to do with him -- it was the very act of writing letters that seduced me. I had always trusted letters; they were magical to me. Every person I addressed on paper became an idealized recipient: good, kind, generous, forbearing. Sitting down to write a letter would put me in mind of my grandmother, who would arrive at our house with a layer of correspondence lying in wait at the bottom of her suitcase. These were not her letters to me, but rather letters I’d written to her, each of them covered in red ink. She corrected my letters! After the unpacking of the suitcases and the distributing of the multifarious cakes and cookies she had lugged onto the Greyhound bus, we would sit at the small desk in my bedroom while Gram went over my pre-teen ramblings line by line and quizzed me: "Now, how do you spell 'Popsicle'?" In these letters to Gram, I learned how to squeeze the nectar of news out of the daily banalities of elementary school. And it wasn’t just the content of letters that was intriguing, I soon discovered, but also their form -- the stationery, the ink, the particular penmanship that elevated each missive into an article of intimacy and disclosure, an ever-renewing pact between friends.

Besides my grandmother, I never expected anyone to save all my letters (as I do theirs, guiltily -- even two-word Christmas and thank-you cards -- toting bursting trunks of yellowing pages through my frequent moves). But I didn't expect anyone to sell them either. I considered writing a curt letter to my treacherous ex-advisor, attaching a little price tag – maybe $5.98 -- in the upper corner. But my native sloth got the best of my sense of injustice and outrage, and for a while I neglected to do anything at all about it.

Next page | Buying my letters back -- a demented twist on self-publishing