Newsletters From Manhattan

Newsletters from Manhattan is a spellbinding memoir and collection of photographs of a young artist's two months stay in New York City. It’s shockingly honest, utterly revealing, and the more personal it gets, the more you feel it’s about you, moments you’ve hidden from yourself or pretended to forget. Her words capture the overwhelming, complex, sometimes confusing and altogether beautiful spirit that we all possess.

Invited by a disabled friend recovering from surgery to be his care-taker in Manhattan, the author feels her way through a world that is laugh-out-loud hilarious but punctuated by heartbreak, depression, and dazzlement. She experiments with her meds that are prescribed for ADHD and a mood disorder, but she’s wonderfully, tenderly sane, and truthful to a fault. She gets lost daily, fights with the subway pass system, meets a fortune teller, sits on the grass to watch a street performer, attracts a streetwise mentor named Sully and embarks on a never ending search for the perfect NY hot dog. The imagery woven throughout is fascinating; both her internal dialogue and her descriptions of the city and its inhabitants. She describes the newness of her experiences, familiar matters of the heart, and the suffocating dynamics of caregiving; all the while photographing everything she sees with her cell phone camera. It’s the journal we all wish we could write, but we’re not brave enough, feral enough, or honest enough.