Dear People Who Write Open Letters,
I’ve had questions for you for a long time, but a recent Open Letter about how you’re offended when your husband asks you what you’ve been “up to” all day was the last straw.
If you want your husband to realize that “the dishwasher’s not still full, it’s full again,” isn’t that a conversation you should have over a glass of wine on the couch before you Netflix a little Breaking Bad? What’d he think of your article? Did he go to work all unwitting and then see it when a buddy forwarded it to him in the office? Yo Bob saw you’re wifes article lol. Did your husband muse, “So that’s why the dishwasher’s full of unwashed Spaghetti-O’s bowls”? Is he writing an Open Letter to you about how it’s not actually that hard to get out of your PJ’s before 6pm?
I love fantasizing about your marriage. But would I have done that if you had called the essay “Never ask the mother of your children what she’s been up to”? Do you think the Open Letter format could be a side effect of our over-confessional digital society? Are you worried that no one’s going to want to read your piece on its own merits, but only if they feel like they’re peeking at your mail?
Your Open Letters take many forms. Some are a way of saying something to someone you don’t know. It’s just a bonus that these missives also have urgent, widely applicable cultural importance, like your Open Letter to the Fat Girl I Saw at Hot Yoga in New York City.
Other times, your Open Letters have a pseudo-literary effluvium (or is that effulgence?), like your Open Letter to My Boarding School, an extended metaphor comparing your school to a grubby, ambivalent, yet oddly magnetic boyfriend.
“I immediately thought of our long nights together — empty bottles of Diet Pepsi and my glowing computer screen. I thought about the steady click-clack of my keyboard; click-clack like an alphabet rainstick, little pools of Times New Roman filling the wrinkles of my bed,” you wrote. My heart ached with the privilege of witnessing you and your craft in a way it never could have if your teenaged nostalgia had not been couched as a florid letter that just happened to fall into my hands.
“You weren’t actually unfaithful,” you confided to the school (and, incidentally, to us). “You simply outlived your marriages. Just as I knew you would outlive ours. Tomorrow, you would cauterize our relationship with a senior ring, a rose, and a diploma.”
A force for good
Sometimes your Open Letters seek some change in society. When Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries told a magazine writer that his company’s clothes are for skinny people only, notes from you to Jeffries sprouted online faster than Vogue can Photoshop cellulite. This rare glimpse into the heretofore completely silent collective psyche of chubby girls like me changed the world forever.
In fact, it worked so well you did the same for Lululemon CEO Chip Wilson (after he charged you over $100 for one pair of yoga pants and then said the fabric pilled because you’re too fat) with your “Letter to Lululemon, on behalf of women whose thighs touch,” and many others. Only an Open Letter could have exposed the rampant myth of the “thigh gap” and reformed a fat-shaming businessman all in one. It was icing on the cake that this epistle got to warm my heart along the way.
And nothing is more mouthwatering than a public dressing-down. To share your indignation and savor the complex schadenfreude of imagining your target imagining me reading your “Open Letter to Bad Tippers” is a heady brew indeed. And nothing but an Open Letter could have cut cheapskates to the quick.
But I do wonder about your lack of consistency in the narrative voice. Are you talking directly to me? Are you an omniscient speaker? Is it a first-person perspective? Can you choose one and stick with it? I know you published it merely as a cavalier afterthought to your own catharsis, and don’t get me wrong, nothing cements my gaze like knowing you’re about to unload your personal drama, but don’t you have literary standards? Who exactly is your audience? What’s the goal of your letter? Do you even know?
And this is what scares me about you. Not everyone can write an essay. But anyone can write a letter. And look, your letter got published. What does that mean? I work really hard on my essays, and I feel threatened by all the easy airtime you’re getting just by unloading your personal beefs. So I thought I’d write a letter to you. And then — cripes! — I realized that Open Letters to People Who Write Open Letters is already its own subgenre of holier-than-thou snark.
I would revise this into an Open Letter to People Who Write Open Letters to People Who Write Open Letters, but alas, it’s already in the mail — I mean, already published, because gee, I’m not sure where you live. I’m sure you’ll read my letter though.
Sincerely,
Alaina
