Good morning, bookish friends! Today, I wanted to try a bit of a new format - as always tell me what you think. Below, please find an open letter to an author (starting with one of my favs)!
Dear Louise Penny -
You don’t know me (we actually met once at an event for one of your books, but we’ll get to that in a moment), but you’ve greatly influenced my love of reading, my confidence in my own writing, and my understanding of books and community.
Let’s start with my love of reading. I did love reading before I read your novels, don’t get me wrong. I was a shy child (who grew into a shy adult), and the written word was a source of comfort for me. Books were worlds where my imagination could run wild, where I could be anything I wanted, uninhibited by my own timidity. Books were a source of comfort. Books were entertainment and solace, all in one.
I started reading your books in high school. I still loved to read, then, but in a different way than I once did. It was more detached. I didn’t sink into the worlds of books the way I did as a child. And I missed that escapism. Until I picked up your books. To this day (over a decade later), Three Pines is my third home, after only where I grew up and where I live now. I yearn for Olivier and Gabri’s bistro, for Myrna’s bookstores, for the comfort that I find in Clara, myself an eccentric artistic who has food in my unruly hair more often than not. As someone who hates all things winter, I still find myself wanting the peaceful snow of Three Pines. The cold that drives people together in the places where there is warmth. Your books gave back to me the gift of literature that drew me in completely. That a became a part of me in a way that I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to describe. So thank you.
Now, let’s get to that time we met. I was just starting college, pursuing a creative writing degree, and already exhausted with the “And what do you plan to do with that?” questions. I was already disenchanted, even as I leaned into my degree, falling more and more in love with the writing process and the people whose passion fed my own. And then I got to attend an event where you were speaking and promoting your new book (yes, I’d already devoured it). And after you spoke, you signed books and I mentioned what I was studying. You didn’t ask me what I planned to do with that degree. You didn’t tell me the even more unkind version of that question - “You know you can’t earn a living with a degree like that.” You said something to me that has stayed with me through good times and bad. You said, “Perhaps next time we meet, it will be at your book signing.” This happened almost eight years ago, and I still cannot adequately explain what that meant to me and continues to mean.
Now let’s talk bookish community. I first read A Fatal Grace* when I joined a book club at my local library. I was the only teenager in a group really geared towards adults, but we all quickly became an interwoven group, me as the younger sister, daughter, or granddaughter the other members saw me as. That was my first experience truly beginning to understand that books could be the foundation for a community. (Or at least the first time realizing it - I should have seen it earlier when most of my elementary school friendships were premised on the books we all read.)
Years later, I was living in a new town and pursuing a degree that I was doubting, and feeling lost and alone (read more about that particular time in my life here). And so I did the one thing I could think to do to comfort myself - I walked into a bookstore. And it was through that bookstore that I joined a new bookclub. And I met friends that quickly became pillars in my life and my emotional wellbeing. A Fatal Grace showed me that books could create long lasting relationships. And that’s a lesson I’ve carried with me through new places, new experiences, and new changes in my life.
Dear Louise Penny - thank you. For your books. For your kindness. And for the communities of readers your books create.
-Ami
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