Dear Mr. You
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4.3 • 47 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The bestselling, wonderfully unconventional, “warmly conspiratorial…seriously good” (The New York Times) literary memoir from the award-winning actress that has received fabulous and wide praise. “There is no one else quite like Mary-Louise Parker…Funny, heartbreaking and profound” (Elle).
An extraordinary literary work, Dear Mr. You renders the singular arc of a woman’s life through letters Mary-Louise Parker composes to the men, real and hypothetical, who have informed the person she is today. Beginning with the grandfather she never knew, the letters range from a missive to the beloved priest from her childhood to remembrances of former lovers to an homage to a firefighter she encountered to a heartfelt communication with the uncle of the infant daughter she adopted. Readers will be amazed by the depth and style of these letters, which reveal the complexity and power to be found in relationships both loving and fraught.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Actress Parker, winner of Tony and Emmy awards, brings her talent for words to the page in this epistolary collection as she recounts scenes from her life through the men who have influenced her, for better or worse. In a letter to her late father, she writes of his time as a soldier in the Philippines in WWII, where he was shot, barely making it out alive. Decades later, he takes the family to Europe when he can't afford it because Parker's plans to make the trip with friends fell through. He's a father who stands up for his child when the librarian thinks Parker has lied about how many books she's read, and she sees him in her young son as he defends her against another woman's insults. In a warm tribute to her accountant, Abraham, who becomes a lifelong friend (the kind of person who goes to his office on his day off to get her son's passport), she recounts their first meeting when she was a 20-something broke mess (she is now 50) and fell asleep on his office couch. Parker has a raw and powerful apology for the cab driver she cursed out when pregnant and on her own, during dark days when she hadn't been leaving the house. When he tells her to get out of the cab because he "doesn't want her anymore," Parker, in so much emotional pain it "hurts to breathe," can barely utter, "No one does." Like her performances, some of her recollections and interpretations come across as unusual, but there are also many lovely moments touched with grace and beauty.
