Dear Mr. You

In her inventive, unconventional memoir, Dear Mr. You, award-winning actress Mary-Louise Parker offers glimpses into her life via 34 letters written to and about significant men in her life, showing how masculine presences--fleeting, long-term and imagined--have influenced her, for better or worse.

The letters range widely in subject, form and tone. Most pay homage to family, as in "Dear Grandpa," which tells the story of Parker's grandfather and a creative act of love he undertook to brighten a son's dark days during World War II. In "Dear Daddy," Parker writes longingly of her father, his war experiences and how an injury sustained in battle changed his life--and Parker's.

Other letters are odes to--or denunciations of--lost loves, sexual exploits and long-ago intimacies. Tenderness and sensitivity gravitate to the fore in a letter about Parker's short-lived friendship with a man battling cancer. She writes an affectionate portrait about the two-way street of friendship, and humbly recalls meeting the biological uncle of her adopted, Ethiopian-born daughter. In "Dear Future Man Who Loves My Daughter," Parker admiringly glances back at the protectiveness of her own brothers when she was growing up. The men at the center of each letter often serve as mirrors, reflecting much about Parker and those who populate her world.

Whether writing to NASA, poets, musicians, a goat facing castration, an ash-covered firefighter on 9/11 or doctors, Parker's prose is infused with a perfect balance of sarcasm, humor and poetic language. Her letters shine with candid, self-aware depth--unabashed in revealing the truth of her own nature and experiences. 

Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker
Scribner, $25.00 Hardcover, 9781501107832, 240 pp
Publication Date: November 10, 2015
To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (11/24/15), link HERE

This review was also featured (in a longer form) on Shelf Awareness: Book Trade (11/3/15). To read the longer review click HERE

 

Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time

Disgruntled commuters everywhere will rejoice over Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time by British journalist Dominic Utton. The novel is based on the author's true story and centers upon "Dan the man," a husband and new father who moves to the English countryside and commutes, via train, to his job at The Globe newspaper. Fed up with 14 months of chronic delays, Dan, a writer, tracks down the e-mail address of the railroad director, Martin Harbottle, of Premier-Westward rail lines and fires off an e-mail expressing his frustration: "My boss was annoyed with me when I arrived in London; my wife will be annoyed with me when I arrive home again in Oxford. And none of it's my fault. It's your fault." 

The goal of each subsequent correspondence—99 e-mails in all—reflects, in tone and length, the duration of Dan's daily inconveniences due to chronic railroad service delays. Dan believes that if his time has to be wasted, so, too, should the director's, who sporadically writes back to Dan with cautious reserve. What begins as an electronic gripe session spirals into a largely one-sided memoir, where Dan opens up about his life sharing his tastes in music; his impressions of fellow commuters; scandalous current events and politics at his newspaper; the challenges of his home life, especially a wife suffering post-natal depression; and Dan's temptations with alcohol indulgence and a potential extra-marital entanglement. All of this adds up to form a wholly original—and very entertaining—modern epistolary novel.

Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time by Dominic Utton

Oneworld Publications,  $15.99 paperback, 9781780743721, 256 pp

Publication Date: February 25, 2014

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (3/7/14), click HERE