Our plane touched down at Heathrow earlier than expected, and Catherine was still in morning traffic along the winding London roads. November 2017, and I was exhausted from no sleep on the long flight due to my anticipation of a reunion with a longtime friend. It was my teenage son Asher’s first visit to London, and the first time I’d seen Catherine in 21 years. We’d been writing letters, sending gifts for weddings and babies, but hadn’t even talked on the phone or emailed. Though we didn’t know it at the time, both of us hesitated to send other contact information because we loved receiving each other’s letters.
And now there we were, on a gray November morning, the pavement wet and shining, a cool undertone to the wind.
Would it be like the last time we’d hugged goodbye, when she left Washington, D.C., and I resumed my twentysomething life? Before we’d each known love and heartbreak, before we’d married, birthed babies, set up suburban lives and gotten busy with the tasks of daily life.
I don’t remember our first conversation at my cousin’s wedding in 1993, in a Catholic church in Pittsburgh. I remember a party on the Saturday night, with all of us bridesmaids and groomsmen and college friends and Catherine, who met my cousin during summer study at Notre Dame. We were the characters in a hastily created scene of young love and my cousin’s hope for a long and satisfying future.
What did we say that inspired us to write letters, visit each other and stay friends over the decades?
Catherine has been my friend for 30 years now, a soulmate whose long-distance presence kept me going through the dark years of a bad marriage and the bright lights of a second chance. I often wonder if we’ve been friends for so long because we’ve escaped the details of living near each other. Has the distance strengthened our bond?
Last week, before my writers retreat in Scotland, I flew to London for 48 hours with one of my favorite people. Catherine. A friend that I can say anything to, do anything with, who will be bluntly honest and great fun all the time. When we are together, we never stop talking. It’s wonderful to have a friend like this.
(Catherine resolutely avoids social media and would not appreciate if I shared her photo with thousands of readers, so here are photos she took.)
Much of our friendship has happened through letters. It’s a form of intimacy that has endured over millennia, and it’s a great tool for furthering a story in a book.
In my next novel, which is in process now, a main character discovers letters buried in a cave near Loch Lomond. These letters provide clues to secrets an aristocratic family has kept hidden for nearly two centuries. Now, the person who discovers them wants to write a book, to put the truth out for all to see. But of course, some people don’t want this to happen.
An "epistolary novel" is fiction written in the form of letters or other documents. The letter as genre predates the novel. As novels emerged in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, many authors included letters as part of the narrative.
Letters in fiction allow readers to hear a character’s voice. They provide intimacy and insight into the character traits of a particular person. They also advance the plot by providing needed information that cannot come in any other way.
The first novel in English to be composed entirely of letters is considered to be Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, published in 1684 anonymously. The story features events of the Monmouth Rebellion and offers narrative via letters, which make readers feel as though they have access to secrets only found in private correspondence.
The epistolary novel really grew in popularity when Samuel Richardson wrote in the genre in the mid-18th century. Read this New Yorker piece about him.
But enough history of the form. How might you use letters as a way in to a deeper understanding of character?
When I visited Catherine in 2017, our first visit after writing letters only since 1995, she invited her closest friends to a dinner party because they wanted to meet me. Over wine and roast chicken, she told me that she knew I wasn’t happy in my first marriage. It was nothing I’d said. It was what she could read between what I wrote in my letters.
She knew me that well, from the words on the page, and the words I did not include.
A powerful art form indeed.
May Book Giveaway Winner
Congratulations to Brenda Blue, winner of the May book giveaway! Brenda will receive Annie Cathryn’s The Friendship Breakup.
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Thank you for reading! Happy writing until we meet again.
With love, Lynne