When I wrote to my grandmother, I gave her my version of our
family trip to Washington, D.C., and my written version lived. She
believed it, she believed me, she used my writing to affirm or deny
what others told her. When I wrote letters home from camp, my
scribbled begging brought forth cookies, money, the wished-for
phone call. When I wrote my pen pal a description of my appear-
ance, my words created the body she saw. In letters, where for a while
I controlled both the content and form of what was said, my words
had power.

As I grew older and corresponded with friends, lovers, and fara-
way family members, I continued to enjoy the particular powers of
letters, without ever articulating those powers to myself. But over the
past few years, finding myself drawn to epistolary novels, I began
to wonder more and more about this discourse form. I investigated
histories and theories about letter communication, focusing on fic-
tion, realizing all the while that fictitious letters derive much of their
power from the same impulses and qualities embodied in "authen-
tic" letters (and beginning to realize too that those "authentic" let-
ters embodied many fictional elements). I also wondered to what
effect the letter form might be used within critical discourse. As I
was soon to find out, instead of residing in back-(or front)-of-the-
journal ghettos in PMLA or College English, letters had already moved
to the upscale neighborhood of actual articles.

This book grows out of a personal interest and pleasure in the
letter--a form of writing with the power to encourage intimacy
and enhanced one-to-one understanding of difficult issues. Natu-
rally, letters can be used for distancing and dissimulation as well;
that possibility makes attempts at connection and truthfulness more
intriguing. In a time of alienation (one can question when that time
began) letters still proffer some sense of physical connection, endur-
ing material substance, individualized or private (confidential) lan-
guage. Each letter in its envelope is also a package of aesthetic,
conceptual, and emotive qualities, derived from the writer's circum-
stances, but existing within the context still of his or her society and
its values.

This book you are holding is not a letter, yet I want to maintain
the fiction that it can function as one. You receive it as a complete
entity, anticipating that the reading experience ahead of you, unlike
"real life" experience, will have a perceivable beginning, middle,
and end. Now, a letter is written by a particular person to a particular

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