epistolary leanings

My course on women's autobiography turns this coming week to letter-writing. My own leanings toward letters began decades ago. I had a pen-pal in elementary school and I wrote painfully ironic epistles to my friend Abby in junior high. We traded intricately folded notes in the hallways with all the cool detachment that pimply, awkward adolescents can muster. In college and before the internet took hold, I began the longest and most formative exchange with a man who remains my close friend. His letters, with their perfect prose and literary intimacy thrilled me, and in my responses, I began to formulate a different self, an ideal self, one that worked only partially with the world in which I lived. In the space of the letter, I could be whomever I pleased, and I often imagined that I got to be my "real" self. It was a self that he could not see, at least not very often, and its consistency required only a weekly letter -- or later, a daily salutation from a lonely tiny coal-mining town in eastern europe where I could only ever seem to order dessert wine, my czech so faulty that my diet suffered enormously -- and an introspection that disregarded so many of my desires. He and I wrote for years and though I would write letters with one other man, they would never approximate the fire, the thrill, the breathlessness of the original.

In my 20s, I began a long and still lively correspondence with my friend who is a poet and schoolteacher. In the space of those letters, we muscled through years of heartbreak and depression, driftlessness and despair. With a quiet dignity refined early in Connecticut that always felt charmingly at odds with her Manhattan exploits, she wrote of biting girls on bathroom floors. I wrote about men who were wrong, about first dates gone awry, about finally finding J when I had all but given up on love. I never felt at odds with the self I sent to her. Instead, in my letters I found a space to be -- to relax, to imagine, to laugh.

And so now I turn to letters in the class, coming to the seminar table as I do with a history of penning myself to those I cannot see. We'll begin with the strangely manipulative, often cruel, utterly unsentimental letters of M. Carey Thomas, the great matriarch of Bryn Mawr who carried on at least two relationships at a time, hoping, I suppose, that her letters were never misdirected. Then we're on to the Dickinson in whose letters to Higginson she plays the schoolgirl, asking to be his "scholar," hoping to find in him something, though what it is is hard to say. We'll end with Marianne Moore's letters to a friend while she was still a student at Bryn Mawr. In the letters, she reminds so much of the poet from Amherst -- and with this, I leave you, you whom I cannot see:

"You asked me about my letters -- my letters are better than my stories I suppose because I am not self-conscious because I am thinking of you (whoever you are)."