Ava Dellaira’s Love Letters to the Dead owes a lot to The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Dellaira
was Stephen Chboksy’s padawan) but as it goes on it just about succeeds in
finding its own voice. I have actually found it hard to start reading a new
book after finishing it because it has moments of heartfelt insight that really
settle in your mind. Laurel has her own distinct history and her own unique
pains which Dellaira draws out at just right pace while making her a believable
and intriguing character.
Let’s get the Perks comparisons out of the way. Making
these comparisons isn’t exactly helpful – certainly not as helpful as pointing out
the differences - but it highlights the crucial themes (in these ‘young adult’
novels) which arise. So there is a slightly different premise in Love Letters but essentially they both
use the epistolary format in a similar, confessional and therapeutic kind of
way. Both Charlie and Laurel find encouragement in their English teachers, who
prompt them to explore their own thoughts and who they want to be. They both
become friends with people who are struggling with their sexuality and the
quirky outsiders who smoke pot and skip class. There are family issues, sibling
bonds, first loves, and instances of sexual abuse. All set over a year at the
intermediary stage of high school. It’s becoming a formula, but it’s the
quality of the writing and the depth of the characters and their development
which ultimately matter.
Laurel begins
writing letters to the dead as an extension of her High School English project.
Among the contemporary cult heroes she writes to are Kurt Cobain, Amy
Winehouse, Amelia Earhart, Janis Joplin, River Phoenix, Judy Garland and Heath
Ledger. In them she tries to come to terms with her sister’s death – and life
-, feeling abandoned by her mother and her life beginning again at a new
school. This might feel a bit gimmicky to some readers, but it is redeemed by
Laurel engaging a little with the intended recipients and their own stories. They
are all relevant to a degree. It will divide readers though – especially those
who have read similar things before. A lot of the drama and relationships are
predictable and the journey to their resolution perhaps not explored deeply
enough, particularly in some of the side characters. Some readers have felt a
bit distanced from the characters and unable to relate or engage with them,
others have felt the opposite. Unhelpfully, I felt in between. It wasn’t the
kind of revelation I’ve experienced before but I warmed to the novel in the
second half particularly – when it got darker and more intricate and I came to
quite like it regardless of its flaws.
*Spoiler* It
may be a strange assertion but I think Dellaira was doing something subtle and
clever in the way May (Laurel’s older sister) died. Her death was something
strange and inexplicable – a kind of universal accident. She was there one
minute and gone the next – whether it was a change in the wind, suicide, a slip
– she falls off the bridge. That is part of what hangs over Laurel throughout
her letter writing – it seemed so silly, so preventable. If it was murder or a
car accident or something it would be a very different story. As it is it is
posited as a kind of existential struggle as well as a personal one. I think it’s
the letters to Kurt Cobain that Laurel begins to find especially challenging –
the relationship between her grief, her resentment, her inability to comprehend
what happened – the Absurdity of May’s death - and his suicide. She fixates on
his suicide note (‘you said it in one sentence I can’t get out of my head: I simply love people… so much that it makes
me feel too fucking sad. Yes, I understand’). The resentment boils over at
times: ‘Nirvana means freedom. Freedom from suffering. I guess some people
would say that death is just that. So, congratulations on being free, I guess.
The rest of us are still here, grappling with all that’s been torn up’ and ‘I
don’t know why I’ve written you all these letters. I thought you got it. But you
just left, too. Like everyone does’. Her one-way conversation with Kurt is
crucial in her negotiation of her feelings surrounding her sister’s death, and
her mother’s departure. It helps her to realise that she is angry and that she
must find a way to forgive May (‘the truth is, I don’t know how to forgive my
sister. I don’t know how to forgive her, because I don’t deserve to be angry at
her. And I’m afraid if I am, I will lose her forever’.)
There are some
great quotable passages especially when Dellaira is writing about the real depths of Laurel’s despair – the things we keep hidden
from our peers, and even from our closest friends. Writing to Amy Winehouse,
Laurel explains: ‘there was something between me and the world right then. I saw
it like a big sheet of glass, too thick to break through. I could make new
friends, but they could never know me, not really, because they could never
know my sister, the person I loved most in the world. And they could never know
what I’d done. I would have to be okay standing on the other side of something
too big to break through’. When there are parts of your past or yourself that
you can’t reveal to those you consider closest to you, it can be incredibly
alienating (more than that – it can reaffirm in your mind that you’re weird or
alien) and that is really expressed here. As the novel darkens, Laurel writes: ‘I
hope one of you hears me because the world seems like a tunnel of silence. I have
found that sometimes, moments get stuck in your body. They are there, lodged
under your skin like hard seed-stones of wonder or sadness or fear, everything
else growing up around them. And if you turn a certain way, if you fall, one of
them could get free… I feel like I am drowning in memories. Everything is too
bright’. The imagery here is almost perfect. That is all.
I randomly love
what Laurel writes to Judy Garland when talking about Judy’s own childhood – ‘you
learned right away that applause sounds like love’. I suppose it’s because it
says a lot about fame and performance – the things that motivate people often lie
in their childhood. Like the way that Laurel writes that Judy used her ‘voice
like glue to [her] family together’ by singing to stop them fighting or to make
them laugh.
Here’s a corny
one from Laurel’s stoner guru (friend) Tristan: ‘When we are in love, we are
both completely in danger and completely saved’. Tristan tends to play guitar,
alone and unheard and Laurel surmises that ‘he does this for the same reason Hannah
doesn’t turn in her work when her teachers say she is smart. I think a lot of
people want to be someone, but we are scared that if we try, we won’t be as
good as everyone imagines we could be’. Or perhaps, as we imagine we could be.
But Tristan’s
best contribution comes much later and it is a really resonant message about
any personal struggle:
‘You fall asleep in the foothills, and the wolf comes
down from the mountains. And you hope someone will wake you up. Or chase it
off. Or shoot it dead. But when you realise that the wolf is inside you, that’s
when you know. You can’t run from it. And no one who loves you can kill the
wolf, because it’s part of you. They see your face on it. And they won’t fire
the shot.’
There are some things that other people can’t reach, and you have to
face the wolf yourself, but it’s not because they don’t love you.
There’s too
many to analyse individually and as usual they are at the end of this post. If
you can relate to any of these then I think this book is worth reading, because
it’s always nice to find understanding in the pages of a book. Like I said, the
second half is stronger and it reaches a conclusion that feels satisfying
(perhaps too much so?). Don’t let other people put you off, because with books
like this in particular it’s really subjective and can be really a negotiation
of your own demons.
I'd be interested in hearing what you thought - does it do enough to distinguish itself? Is it too similar to others of its kind?
Other Quotes:
- 'It’s sad when everyone knows you, but no one knows you… and
if you wear leather pants, and have a beautiful body, and drink lots of
expensive wine, and if your voice sounds like the edge you strike a match on,
then these things are blocks that you have given them to build the person they
want… I want people to know me, but if anyone could look inside of me, if they
saw that everything I feel is not what it’s supposed to be, I don’t know what
would happen.'
- (When her friend Hannah starts
painting bruises on her cheekbone): 'Sometimes we want our bodies to do a
better job of showing the things that hurt us, the stories we keep hidden
inside of us.'
- 'You grew up so fast, River. But maybe the little boy who
needed someone to protect him never went away. You can be noble and brave and
beautiful and still find yourself falling.'
- 'Amy, you were all over the covers of tabloids and stuff,
doing what you did. and how the world is now, how we follow everyone and try to
see everything, it changes the story. It makes your life into someone else’s
version of you. And that’s not fair. Because your life didn’t belong to us.
What you gave us was your music. And I am grateful for it.'
- 'I thought about how for a long time, I wanted to be soaring
above the earth. I wanted Sky to see me as perfect and beautiful, the way I saw
May. But really, we all just have these blood and guts inside of us. And as much
as I was hiding from him, I guess part of me also always wanted Sky to see into
me – to know the things that I was too scared to tell him. But we aren’t
transparent. If we want someone to know us, we have to tell them stuff.'
- '“There are a lot of human experiences that challenge the
limits of our language,” she (Mrs. Buster) said, “that’s one of the reasons that we have
poetry.” Then she said, “I’m proud of you. It’s not easy, and
you’ve done a great job this year.” She didn’t have to be that nice to me, but
she was.'
- 'Maybe when we can tell the stories, however bad they are, we
don’t belong to them anymore. They become ours. And maybe what growing up
really means is knowing that you don’t have to just be a character, going
whichever way the story says. It’s knowing that you could be the author
instead.'
- 'Sometimes when we say things, we hear silence. Or only
echoes. Like screaming from inside and that’s really lonely. But that only
happens when we weren’t really listening. It means we weren’t ready to listen
yet. Because every time we speak, there is a voice. There is the world that
answers back. When I wrote letters to all of you, I found my voice. And when I
had a voice, something answered me…. I know I wrote letters to people with no
address on this earth. I know you are dead. But I hear you. I hear all of you. We were here. Our lives matter.'
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