PAM I wasn't familiar with this book or author and tried to check it with our library. Sorry, they don't have any copies, but I'll be interested to read what others think of it.

Thanks Vee - I guess we can just let the thread go down, down, down...

PAM

Merry - I agree with you on a lot of the points.

A huge YES to the unnecessary distraction of the Texan. Part of me wonders if he was injected as an afterthought to add a few more pages to the book. His appearance seems to be separate from all else. Unless the author thought that adding him as a contrast to the lovely gentleman neighbor was needed. Women tend to be attracted to the "bad boy" and that may have been the Texan. We learned nothing much about him and I was figuring on him being nothing much more than a con artist after her money.

The main character angered me about all of her talk in being abandoned by her birth mother and full of anquish over the death of her son and her role in his death. But yet, but yet, she perpetuated the abandonment trauma in the family by making her own daughter feel abandoned by a living mother who was constantly grieving a dead son instead of finding a way to heal the past with a living daughter. The daughter HAD a mother up to the day Gilbert died. Now, I am neither adopted nor (thank God) have a lost a child so I do not mean to downplay the heartwrenching emotions involved. But couldn't she both grieve for what she lost whilst also loving what she still had?

As a writer myself, and a user of fountain pens and journals, I loved the letters and the fact that so many people returned her message also by written word. It gave me hope - hope that perhaps people will pick up the pen again. It seems that schools will again teach cursive (why they got rid of it can be debated). But perhaps this will, in turn, result in a deeper appreciation and increased participation in writing.

Added to that last sentiment, I am informed by sources younger than me that there is a movement called the "analog year". This is a rather large movement, it seems, of younger folks - the age of my kids, so yound adult - putting aside those electronic screens and turning toward what they affectionately call "granny hobbies" like reading books vs kindles, writing with pens vs typing a Word doc, crochet and knitting and gardening and cooking also make the list. Finally, it seems, I am "cool".

PAM

I agree she added to the tragedy by withdrawing from her daughter and leaving her husband to essentially parent alone. She must have felt terrible guilt and that she was a bad mother when Gilbert died, and so let her husband essentially raise the remaining children. The children would not understand that and just feel abandoned like her daughter did.

Yes, "granny hobbies" are in! My daughter is in her twenties and she and some of her friends knit and crochet. They get together and discuss books, though it's usually over zoom because not everyone is local. Procrasti-baking was a big thing when she was in college. I think there is a lot of anxiety in young adults for many reasons (AI eliminating jobs, war, affordability etc...) and things that take focus and are tactile can be comforting. Also, she spends all day in front of a computer for work and needs to get away from it.

I have not read this book but am making comments about writing and hobbies that have been mentioned here. I wrote to my family in England for thirty years from Australia. An aerogramme every Sunday with so much to mention that sometimes I enclosed an extra page as well. My mother, living in a small seaside town, replied less often with not much news though! Later, international phone calls got so cheap that I could ring the family instead.

I don't know about granny hobbies done by the younger generation but here in the Retirement Village card making is popular. Cards can be expensive to buy if you want the ones with fancy ornaments or inserts. I got the supervisor who runs the classes to make a wedding one for me to my design so the couple had something unique to keep.

As a person who has worked from home for the past six years and sits in front of three screens all day every day, I completely understand your daughter. We move data. From screen to screen, program to program. Our means of communication are zoom/teams calls and email. Your daughter and I feel the need to CREATE something, to actually make something because working in a computer all day (at least in my case) is just data. I don't create, I do a lot of things, but I just sit in my house all day in front of the screens to do it. It is very Fahrenheit 451.

So at the end of the day, I also want to use my hands to make something - to crochet, to knit, to make pasta, to DO SOMETHING that says, "I WAS HERE." just like Sybil in the book - her letters were lasting, or at least had the opportunity to be more lasting than a text. It was a tactile SOMETHING that did not just disappear.

What are we giving up by not writing? And thank goodness the younger generations are begining to notice the gaps.

PAM

Apparently there is to be a movie starring Jane Fonda.

Merry,

It would be interesting to see how they adapt it to the big screen!

But Jane Fonda?

Sigh... not a fan. The book is always better anyhow.

PAM

Well my book group voted for this book for next month, so looks like I'll get to discuss it again. I"ll let you know the verdict. We choose the next book at each meeting. Members vote among three books suggested by the host. The runners up were Becoming Madam Secretary by Stephanie Dray and The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan. We were on a history kick for a bit so I think the group wanted something different.

I read The Correspondent and liked it better than I had expected I would. I thought it was a beautiful love letter to books, as the correspondant herself and her friends always mentioned the books they were reading. I had read some of them, not others. Right now I am a third of the way through Lonesome Dove. I was inspired to read it by the main character's thoughts on this book. I had always meant to read it and never had. I very much like Larry McMurtry's books, but they do have a tendency to leave me with a feeling of sadness, so I had fallen out of the habit of reading them. This book might be his best.