This memoir was easy—and difficult—to write. My mother, my friends, and I wrote it together. Between 1994, as I got ready to graduate from Seattle University and went on a Jesuit retreat and got my first lengthy letter from my mother, and about 2004, when the letters ceased coming in the mail with her identifiable handwriting on the envelope, the memoir was writing itself, out of joy and pain and yearning.

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As the millennium approached and e-mail became more ubiquitous, we still chose the traditional epistolary format, as did my friends. There was always something romantic, at least for me, about actually writing a letter, as we aligned ourselves with letter writers from centuries before (some of the first novels, especially by women, chose the epistolary format), working out our needs and loves and frustrations with paper and pen and sometimes printer ink. Writing letters afforded us more space to write, slowed down the pace of our thoughts, increased the tension as each letter left our part of the world and entered the cavern of the mailbox, allowed us the climactic experience (a climax to the expectation, the waiting) of walking to the front door, slitting open an envelope, unfolding a crisp tri-fold, and drinking in each others’ carefully crafted thoughts, rather than simply opening up a button on our computer screen with one touch, scanning the screen, then deciding whether to hit the reply button or which folder to stick it in.

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Writing, folding, addressing, licking, walking, sending, waiting—these are all very personal and active and intimate actions. Therefore, choosing to present this decade in my life as letters instead of writing them as prose narrative was an easy decision.  I want to welcome you into our conversation.