Airmail Read online

  Introduction

  To my first time

  LOS ANGELES, USA

  Susan Orlean

  Gia Carides

  Kim Airs

  Kirsten Vangsness

  Melissa Auf der Maur

  Felicity Ward

  To the thing I wish I’d written

  AUSTIN, USA

  John Sayles

  Jenny Owen Youngs

  Kim Boekbinder

  Buck 65

  Emma Swift

  To the person I misjudged

  NEW YORK, USA

  Cindy Gallop

  Virginia Lloyd

  To a wish

  JAKARTA, INDONESIA

  Olin Monteiro

  Okky Madasari

  Khairani Barokka

  Laura Jean McKay

  Emilie Zoey Baker

  To the time it didn’t work out

  UBUD, INDONESIA

  Lionel Shriver

  Anne Summers

  Robin de Crespigny

  Carina Hoang

  To the thing I wish I’d written

  UBUD, INDONESIA

  Julian Burnside

  Jon Doust

  Ketut Yuliarsa

  To the thing I wish I’d written

  LOS ANGELES, USA

  Moby

  Tim Minchin

  Melissa Stetten

  Josh Radnor

  Merrill Markoe

  To the last time

  LOS ANGELES, USA

  Marianna Palka

  Bojana Novakovic

  Kayden Kross

  To the person who told me the truth

  SAN FRANCISCO, USA

  Ayelet Waldman

  Allison Page

  Ellen Forney

  Laura Welcher

  Daphne Gottlieb

  Natalie Baszile

  To the thing I wish I’d written

  AUSTIN, USA

  Thor Harris

  Marian Mereba

  Marchelle Bradanini

  To the moment the lights came on

  CHICAGO, USA

  Tavi Gevinson

  Claire Zulkey

  Kate Harding

  Arlene Malinowski

  To the thing I wish I’d written

  NEW YORK, USA

  Lev Grossman

  Jean-Michele Gregory

  Emilie Zoey Baker

  Luke Davies

  Fritz Donnelly

  To the night I’d rather forget

  NEW YORK, USA

  J D Samson

  Mary Jane Gibson

  Kyra Miller

  To my missing puzzle piece

  EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND

  Brooke Magnanti

  Regi Claire

  Jenny Lindsay

  Rachel McCrum

  Lake Montgomery

  Siân Bevan

  Katharine Grant

  To the path I could have taken

  DUBLIN, IRELAND

  Monica McInerney

  Felicity McCall

  Celia de Fréine

  Jessica Traynor

  To the thing I wish I’d written

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  Glen Duncan

  Sarah Maple

  Hayley Campbell

  Sarah Pinborough

  To the thing I wish I’d written

  UBUD, INDONESIA

  Carlos Andrés Goméz

  Rayya Elias

  Phil Jarratt

  To a missed opportunity

  UBUD, INDONESIA

  Val McDermid

  Emilie Zoey Baker

  Eimear McBride

  Lily Yulianti Farid

  Contributors

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Marieke Hardy is a writer, broadcaster, producer and artist. She is a regular panellist on ABC’s The Book Club, the creator of the hit TV show Laid and a curator of live art. A collection of her essays was published in 2011.

  Michaela McGuire is the author of Last Bets: A True Story of Gambling, Morality and the Law and the Penguin Special A Story of Grief. She has worked as a columnist for the Saturday Age, QWeekend and The Monthly, and is a regular contributor to Good Weekend and the Saturday Paper.

  womenofletters.com.au

  To Katherine Robertson, Sondra Davoren

  and Magdalena McGuire

  Edgar’s Mission is a not-for-profit sanctuary for neglected, abused and discarded farmed animals.

  Edgar’s Mission’s Farm Sanctuary, located in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range at Willowmavin, via Kilmore, Victoria, is currently home to over 250 animal residents. As an animal sanctuary, the mission has a policy to ‘Rescue, Rehabilitate and Rehome’ wherever possible. Edgar’s Mission also runs adoption programs for people willing and able to provide permanent homes for rescued animals.

  For the sake of the animals that could not be saved, public outreach is also a big part of everyday life at the sanctuary. With farm tours, school visits and appearances at markets and community events around the state, Edgar’s Mission aims to inform and educate the public as well as expand their circle of compassion to include all animals. Feeling the warmth of a farmed animal can clear the mind and inspire change in people’s attitudes and actions. After all, the ongoing decision to choose kindness is the greatest contribution a person can make to ending animal suffering.

  And it all started with a pig. Edgar’s Mission was founded by Pam Ahern and named after her first rescued pig, Edgar. Edgar Alan Pig, aka ‘the pig who started it all’, sadly passed away shortly after his seventh birthday party in April 2010. Edgar, a gentle giant, touched so many people and was an amazing ambassador for pigs and farmed animals everywhere. He is missed beyond words – but his mission will continue.

  edgarsmission.org.au

  The publication of this new volume of letters coincides perfectly with our fifth anniversary. Five years, five books, and, now, letters from shows across five overseas countries. Halfway through 2012 we got together for dinner, spread a map of the United States across Marieke’s kitchen table, started circling cities and writing a wishlist of American contributors. Six months later, we collapsed over a table of fried yellow food at Denny’s, unable to believe that the line for our first Los Angeles show had snaked around the block, or that Denny’s really was, as our cab driver had insisted, ‘the best option for right now’.

  After an initial run of three shows across the US, we’ve travelled the show in destinations as far-flung as Jakarta and Edinburgh. Whether they’ve taken place in a Dublin attic, a Manhattan basement, or during a (very noisy) parade for Yogyakarta’s 257th birthday, the shows remain identical in format. Our international stages are still a safe space for performers to share their letters on those nights, and never again if that is their wish, but we’re thrilled to present so many missives in this volume.

  Faced with the possibility of an entire world of writers and artists to approach, we were unable to help including a few gentlemen in our international editions. These very rare, very co-ed ‘People of Letters’ shows are extraordinarily fun to bear witness to, and we hope that you’ll enjoy the taste we’re able to share here.

  Although we’ve graduated from butcher’s paper to a dizzying network of Google spreadsheets, we’re still writing wishlists and planning shows all around the world. We haven’t yet managed to convince Oprah or Hillary Clinton to participate in one of our shows, but we’re completely staggered by the extraordinary calibre of women whose letters we are very proud to present in this volume.

  We, along with these letters, have travelled further than we ever imagined possible. We hope that you’ll enjoy the journey as much as we have.

  When my grandmother died a few years ago, I was given her good china, her less-good silverware, a fur-lined robe, and her Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition. The dictionary was an old brick of a book, leather-bound, with skin-thin pages, and black thumb tabs that look like little half-moons.

  I was more excited about the china and the silverware than the dictionary. After all, I had much newer dictionaries, as well as a computer that could spell and find synonyms on its own.

  It was always in the way, taking up too much room on the bookshelf, so one afternoon, in the throes of spring-cleaning, I decided to get rid of it. Before pitching it into my rummage box, I idly riffled through its pages. I flipped past the colour plates showing the house flags of international steamship lines, and the multi-columned Table of Oils and Fats, and the feathery pen-and-ink drawings of diploids and seed weevils, and, of course, page after page of ant-sized type defining words like ‘gressorial’ and ‘sacrarium’ and ‘tingle’, until I came upon a page – ‘Luna Cornea’ through ‘lustless’ – that was stuck lightly to the next. I peeled the pages apart. Between them was a small four-leaf clover. All of its leaves were facing upward, and its long stem was curved into a lazy ‘J’. The clover was still green, or at least greenish, and the leaves were dry and perfectly flat, but hardy and well-attached to the stem. A little stain of clover juice was printed onto the pages it had been pressed between.

  It was like coming across two lives, pressed between pages: my grandmother’s, and this weed’s, which she must have found – when? When she was out for a walk? At a picnic? In her backyard? Had my grandfather found the clover and given it to her? Or had she got it earlier, from some other boyfriend who had offered it to her, hoping for his own luck?

  Had my grandmother tucked the clover into her dictionary and then forgotten it? Or did she l
ook at it frequently? Did she pick this page for a purpose? Or did she just place it somewhere in the middle of the dictionary and forget to note the page she’d chosen, so that when she went back for it weeks or maybe even years later she couldn’t find it, and never saw it again? It was the first time I had such a distinct sense of my grandmother. I could imagine her as I’d never actually known her, a sense of her as a young woman with the time and patience to sort through blades of grass, looking for four leaves on a clover, believing in the luck one might bring her. And I believed I was lucky, too, having been so close to losing it, to discarding it, to never knowing what I had in my hands.

  That moment, with my inherited dictionary, was the first time I really took stock of the strange serendipity that life is, the near misses and the surprise encounters and the accidents that make up who we are and what we know. My life wasn’t changed dramatically by finding that clover. I didn’t find, say, a lottery ticket, or a priceless diamond she had tucked away for a rainy day. What I found was something both awe-inspiring and slightly disconcerting – the idea that life is a bit of a wild animal that will not be tamed or managed. Or maybe life isn’t really like a wild animal. Maybe it’s a maze, full of turns taken and not taken, and you will never know what would have happened if you chose one rather than the other way to go. You only have what you did choose.

  For the first time, I took the measure of luck when I found that clover, because it was such a small incident that could have so easily not happened, and honestly, I was shaken up realising that the way my life turned out was just a series of tiny, incremental bits of chance and choice. That night, I lay in bed unwinding everything I really am happy about, and saw how many accidents had played into them. What if I hadn’t answered the phone that morning ten years ago and hadn’t ever had that conversation in which a friend told me that she wanted to fix me up with someone, and then I might have never met my husband? What if I hadn’t forgotten to register for the law boards and ended up taking them and going to law school and being a lawyer rather than a writer? What if I hadn’t found that discarded newspaper and hadn’t read the article about an orchid thief and hadn’t decided to write about it? What if I ran that red light? What if the boyfriend who perhaps gave my grandmother that clover had won her over, and she’d married him instead of the man she did marry, and everything, everything, would be different, because my mother wouldn’t have been the girl she was, and I wouldn’t be who I am?

  And then there are all those things I don’t even realise I missed. What if I picked up that scraggly-looking hitchhiker, and he had turned out to be Howard Hughes, and he left me his fortune? What if I had had another child, and he or she became a scientist who cured cancer? What if I’m really good at playing bassoon, but I’ve never played a bassoon, and I’ll go to my grave never knowing that was my true calling? What if? What if?

  This is the sort of thing that keeps me awake at night.

  And then I realise that luck, and fate, happen how they’re going to happen, and that the missed connection and the accidental encounter align in some sort of cosmic balance, and things are what they are. That helps me fall asleep. And then I think of finding that clover in my grandmother’s dictionary, and I’m glad to have had that first time of noticing that long-gone presence in a whole new way; that chance to see for the first time the light touch of memory lingering for a moment on a little leaf, and of reading someone’s history in the flattened petals of a wildflower.

  So this is what’s left behind, these things that end up as our real inheritance – the flotsam and jetsam of life, the stuff that drifts into our hands and into history, the chance impression, the little shadow each of us casts, the fragile thing someone carefully catalogues and cares for and then forgets or maybe doesn’t, the image of an image that conjures a memory that is either real or imagined – these are here, plucked and pressed between the pages, so they will stay fresh forever, or forever slip away.

  5 March 2013

  Dear first time I fed another human being with my own breasts,

  I remember I couldn’t wait to get this being out and into the world so I could love and feed it. I didn’t know if this new person was in fact female or male, as we had decided to have a surprise, though frankly we had left no other stone unturned, having checked almost every other possible aspect about the baby during our pregnancy, but the gender, oh, the precious gender, was to be a surprise, and a surprise it was, as everyone had insisted I was carrying a boy. The old wives tales gushed in full force. ‘It’s definitely a boy, as he hasn’t stolen your beauty!’ some would say. Or ‘You are carrying very out front. It’s a boy for sure!’ And girl it was – Little Bridget.

  Her soft panna cotta face framed by thick aubergine-coloured hair, her tiny form and warm, sweet breath . . . I took her in my arms and lay her on my body, across my still-large, soft, warm belly – ‘Bridget’s old house,’ my husband would later lovingly refer to it as, when I would complain that it wasn’t shrinking fast enough. She opened her delicate, brand-new mouth. She had of course been eating via her umbilical cord direct to stomach till this moment, so this ‘eating from a person’s breast’ situation was new to both of us, and in equal parts exciting and delicious.

  She sucked and breathed with a constant rhythm and made the tiniest of noises. I watched in awe at how strong she was. Her strength and pull were like the tide of the largest ocean. How on earth was it possible that this new being had the strength and knowledge to do this? But she did, and so did I.

  In the first couple of weeks she fed passionately, and unbeknown to me she was apparently sucking the nipple in a shallow fashion, therefore doing some surface damage to my nipples. Ouch, yes, it was difficult, and as the breastfeeding specialist informed me, I was to sun and air the nipples after each feed to heal the cracks she was creating. Well, this exhibition of course gave brand-new meaning to the expression ‘dinner and a show’.

  I still remember the expression on the gardener’s face as he rounded the side of the house only to find me in full sunlight simply carrying out the instructions of the breastfeeding specialist . . .

  I fed her sometimes as I cried silently through the pain, trying desperately to get my entire areola into her mouth, which was the objective, so she could have the nipple in a deep, full way, therefore not gnawing on the tip of it. I know it sounds almost obscene, but this was my life in these first weeks, and I was determined to feed this beautiful creature and have her and me satisfied with the results.

  At exactly four weeks old she was finally big enough. Her mouth had grown so she could easily feed in the way she was meant to. It was such a relief, and we were at last in the groove and cruising along our Milky Way!

  It had taken me a while to get pregnant, and the arrival of this person into our lives was beyond any other joy I had ever experienced. I had never in my life wanted or needed anything more than to mother this child.

  The still, dark nights when just she and I were awake, our poetic moments when we would be alone in the living room feeding and rocking back and forth, she all swaddled tightly and me in loose pyjamas swaying barefoot to Norah Jones or the heartbreakingly beautiful Eva Cassidy singing ‘Fields of Gold’.

  I was also very selfish in those first few weeks: I could barely let her own father hold her, thought only I could do everything . . . Of course, he was great with her and could do all of it just as well as I could, except, of course, the breastfeeding.

  Oh! The joy, the ecstasy of that incredible time, those three and a half years of breastfeeding, the meeting of her every need almost before she even knew she had a need. I later learnt that it’s better to let the kid actually feel the need before you meet the need, but we new, overly eager parents, oh, how we love to meet a need ahead of time!

  She didn’t crawl ever, just sat with her huge, bright blue eyes and played. Those blue eyes later turned the softest pale green. She built with blocks, pretended to read books, drew on paper, rocked to music, banged on pots and pans and tinkered with things while we did whatever we did. Most of the time, however, we would find ourselves literally watching her every move – somehow, anything she did seemed more interesting than anything else.