author spotlight: Maggie Lamond Simone

Some have summer romances. Maggie Lamond Simone has school-year “crushes” instead. Here, she explains in “The End of the September-May Romance…”

“For the past five years of preschool (between two late-year children), I have unfailingly become friends with–and sometimes, close friends with–many of you other moms dropping off your kids. It’s easy to see how this could happen. How could we not? Every day, twice a day, for months on end, we stand there in a small space together waiting to drop off and pick up. I defy any mom to go a month, let alone an entire school year, without ‘falling in like’ with one of the other moms. I’m telling you, it can’t be done. (And Kim, don’t you shake your head out there. Sure, you were a tough nut to crack, but you know by the end of the year you found me irresistible.) So we become friends, and our kids become friends. (We let them think they did the choosing–it’s kind of a mommy secret.) We have playdates, during which we moms have coffee and bagels and cinnamon rolls and talk about life and love and childcare issues while our children busily do whatever it is they do on playdates. (Frankly, we don’t care. As long as we hear no crashes followed by screams of pain, we figure they’re good.) Those playdates eventually transform into dinner dates or ladies’ nights. We enjoy each other’s company for the togetherness, the validation, the support, the sharing, and the simple ease of conversation we wished we got from our men. Ha ha ha…kidding. Sort of. And then the school year ends. The kids promise to see each other over the summer, to go swimming and to the park, and maybe to hit the zoo together a couple times. And it may even happen. But we, being adults, realize the truth for what it is. We’re breaking up…”

MAGGIE LAMOND SIMONE is an award-winning columnist and author. Her humor and observational essays have appeared for six years in Family Times, an award-winning monthly parenting magazine in Syracuse, New York, and The Advertiser, a weekly newspaper in East Aurora, New York. Her essays have appeared in Cosmopolitan, and are included in Chicken Soup for the Soul: My Resolution, Chicken Soup for the New Mom’s Soul, Chicken Soup for the Soul in Menopause, Misadventures of Moms and Disasters of Dads, and Hello, Goodbye. Her first children’s picture book, Sophie’s Sounds, was released in May 2007, and she is awaiting the release of two more picture books, Losing Decker and Timmy and the Timepiece. She’s won multiple awards through Parenting Publications of America. She is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and the New York Press Association, and she is also an adjunct instructor of English at Bryant & Stratton College in Clay, New York. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Hobart and William Smith colleges and a master’s degree from the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications, at Syracuse University. Simone lives in central New York with her husband and two children.

Read the rest of Maggie’s letter, and 35 others, in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, now available on Amazon and in bookstores nationwide!

author spotlight: Kristina Wright

Remember how exciting it used to be to get a white envelope filled with scribbling on lined paper from a good friend, instead of just a “bloop” on your inbox showing you have a new email message? In “The Last Letter,” Kristina Wright pays tribute to the lost art of letter writing, and to an unlikely penpal who became a treasured friend: her husband’s grandmother.

“Our friendship began in the early years of my marriage. I wrote letters to Jay’s family, both out of loneliness and in an attempt to get to know my new husband–who seemed to always be away on deployment–a little better. His father had died when he was a little boy, and you were the next closest link to that side of the family. You matched me letter for letter telling me stories of Jay’s childhood and of your own life and interests. I began to feel a kinship with you–as if we really were family. The funny thing about our friendship is that it blossomed in a way a face-to-face relationship couldn’t. I only saw you a handful of times over the years as we’ve moved around for Jay’s naval career. With you living in Tennessee, and your hearing loss making it hard for you to talk on the phone, I had only your letters to reflect the woman I came to know and love. The woman who remembered events that occurred sixty years in the past with such vivid detail. The woman who didn’t travel outside the United States until she was in her fifties, but remembered so much about England that I felt as if I were traveling with you when I finally visited myself. The woman who took care of her family, who wrote poetry, who loved her garden beyond all reason, who married the wrong man against her family’s wishes, who raised three sons and lost two of them, who took care of her mother past the age of 100, who loved cats and whimsically added an extra ‘b’ to her beloved Tab’s name when Jay and I got married in Tabb, Virginia. The woman who would have liked to be a writer, but life got in the way. The woman who joked that her letters were her ‘blog,’ filled with silly thoughts and nonsense. The Julia I know is full of fire and gumption. The Julia I know is shrewd and clever, always ready with a unique turn of phrase to describe something mundane. The Julia I know reads voraciously–every book I send her is read within days. The Julia I know is homebound, because she doesn’t drive, but her mind lets her travel to all corners of the world through books and memories of the places she’s been. The Julia I know–the Julia I knew…”

KRISTINA WRIGHT (www.kristinawright.com) has been calling herself a writer since Miss Gilmore gave her an A+ on her first short story in the first grade. In the thirty-five years since, she has traded in her wide-rule paper and fat pencils for a PowerBook laptop, and she has managed to rack up hundreds of writing credits for everything from greeting cards to book reviews. Her first novel was published in 1999, and her short fiction has appeared in more than seventy anthologies. She holds a bachelor’s in English and a master’s in humanities (with an emphasis on women’s studies and popular culture) and teaches both English and humanities at her local community college. She lives in Virginia with her husband, Jay, and a menagerie of pets. Her friend and penpal Julia died in February 2009, thirteen months after her stroke. She would have been ninety in November. Her memory–and her words–live on.

Read the rest of Kristina’s letter, and 35 others, in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, now available on Amazon and in bookstores nationwide!

author spotlight: V. Calder

When your neighbor (whose kids play with yours) is a name-dropper and social-ladder-climber who bad-mouths others, you need to find a way to deal with her. In “Life Lessons,” V. Calder has a unique solution: Rather than strangle her neighbor like she really wants to, she instead turns her energy toward etiquette lessons for her kids…

“I’m tired of being angry with you, of bristling every time I’m in your presence. I don’t like the way I feel when I’m around you, brimming with bitterness and on alert, ready to pounce just to protect my family from your ill-mannered gossip or hurtful barbs. I need to write this letter for me, so I can forgive you for past hurts and move forward, so that your negative energy doesn’t get in my way in the future. So how do I get to the next step? How do I continue being friendly without allowing your actions and words to trouble me or my family? I’ve finally found an answer to that, and it’s been within me all along: As a mother, I need to do what’s best for my family, and that means standing up for my children and teaching them how to stand up for themselves–even against you, an adult. So I have you to thank. After all, your unkind actions have allowed me opportunities to teach my kids how to navigate the tumultuous waters of human nature. I now ask them to remember how they felt when you said or did something hurtful, and then to put those emotions into effect the next time they feel like saying something mean to someone…”

V. CALDER is a Massachusetts-based freelance writer who specializes in writing about health, nutrition, and mind/body issues. She has written for magazines such as Men’s Fitness, Fit Pregnancy, Parenting, and Walking, where she was an associate editor (and learned how to stride like a pro). As the mind/body editor of FitForAll.com, she not only realized the benefits of meditation, but she also got to work closely with Herbert Benson, MD, founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital. In her free time, she likes to travel with her husband and two children. Next on her list: Italy’s Amalfi Coast!

Read the rest of V.’s letter, and 35 others, in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, now available on Amazon and in bookstores nationwide!

author spotlight: Robin Silbergleid

Life choices like marriage can sometimes break up a friendship, even if you’re not quite sure why, explains Robin Silbergleid in “In Recipes and CDs”…

“The other night, I cooked those chickpeas you used to make–you know, those spicy ones with turmeric and lemon juice? I loved the way your apartment smelled, the sizzle of onions and garlic in oil. I keep the recipe in the front pocket of my black binder, along with the recipe for Thai curry that I also got from you. It’s been six years, and I’m not quite sure what happened, or when we stopped being best friends and started being acquaintances at best. But you’re always with me. In the recipes I cook, in the black pens I buy at Staples, in the books lined on my shelves. But I feel your absence most at those turning points when I really need a confidant. You weren’t there when I miscarried. You weren’t there when I gave myself shot after shot after shot and finally found the two blue lines on the test stick. (“All the fertility nonsense,” you called it the last time we spoke on the phone, dismissing two years of my life in a turn of the phrase.) You weren’t there when I brought the baby home from the hospital, and you weren’t there when I named her Hannah. You never even bothered to send a card. You, a woman who had regular coffee dates with a man you called your “benign stalker.” You must really hate me. Every year on Yom Kippur I write you a letter of apology, a letter I never send. I’m sorry I missed your wedding. I’m sorry I cried at the reception. I’m sorry I never said I’m sorry sooner. Most of all, I’m sorry I don’t know how to be friends with a married woman. I told myself I hurt you so badly you never wanted to talk to me again (even if I’m not quite sure what I did wrong). I told myself you were desperately jealous that I got the kid and the job without all the nonsense of heterosexual romance. I told myself I was full of shit. I told myself you just didn’t care…”

ROBIN SILBERGLEID is assistant professor of English at Michigan State University, where she teaches literature and creative writing. She is the author of the chapbook Pas de Deux: Prose and Other Poems (Basilisk Press, 2006), and her poems and essays have appeared in journals including The Truth about the Fact, River Oak Review, Crab Orchard Review, and the Cream City Review, for which she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection of poems The Baby Book began as a piece she wrote for J.’s son on the occasion of his birth, a poem that never actually made it into the collection. He is, however, included in Texas Girl, a book-length memoir that deals with becoming a single mother by choice. Robin is looking for publishers for both books. Following the birth of her daughter, Robin moved to Michigan; she has many friends in East Lansing, but they are not J.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Spooky alert…for some reason this morning, we were drawn to Robin’s letter today to make as today’s spotlight, and then while typing her bio editor realized that she’s actually wearing a Michigan State University sweatshirt this morning. Coincidence? You decide…

Read the rest of Robin’s letter, and 35 others, in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, now available in bookstores nationwide!

author spotlight: Karrie Gavin

In Karrie Gavin’s laugh-out-loud “My Year as Your BFF,” she illustrates the 80s era perfectly–green-and-blue plaid Tretorns, Benetton, Sun-In, and sad, crooning songs when you’re nursing a break-up with an 8th grader you have nothing to say to but are convinced you’re going to marry anyway…

“I loved having a boyfriend, even if we had nothing to talk about when we called each other on the phone. I dreaded calling him, but I did it so I’d have something to talk about to you the next day (“We talked for a whole hour…My parents were going to kill me!”) But the best times I had weren’t with Randy–they were with you. Remember when we decided we needed to have “our songs” with our boyfriends? We chose them with no input at all from the boys. Mine with Randy was “I Think We’re Alone Now,” by Tiffany, and yours with Greg was “Faith” by George Michael. When you showed up at my bedroom door red-eyed and teary, I knew it was over–not only for you and Greg, but also for me and Randy. We listened to George Michael again and again, and you officially changed “your song” to “One More Try,” the sad last track where George begs for another chance with his true love. Conveniently, Tiffany also had a sad, longing last track on her album: “Could’ve Been,” about mourning the end of a relationship. You told me during recess the following day that you heard Randy was going to break up with me. It was inevitable. After all, you’d orchestrated my relationship with Randy, so it made perfect sense that you would orchestrate our breakup. I called Randy after school that day. “This isn’t working out. Our relationship has run its course,” I said maturely, as per your instructions, to the boy I still believed I would marry…”

KARRIE GAVIN is a freelance writer who lives with her husband, Damian, and their dog, Dottie, in Philadelphia. She is the author of Moon Philadelphia, part of the esteemed Moon Handbooks guidebook series from Avalon Travel Publishing. Karrie has written for USAirways magazine, AAA World, Philadelphia magazine, Pennsylvania Wine & Spirits, and numerous wedding and shelter publications. She covers a wide variety of topics, but Philadelphia, travel, and relationships are her specialties. Karrie has a master’s in journalism from Temple University, where she also taught public speaking. She is currently working on a memoir.

Read the rest of Karrie’s letter, and 35 others, in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, now available in bookstores!

author spotlight: Judy Sutton Taylor

If your friend was killed in the Lockerbie bombing of 1988, just one semester after you had been on that same London internship program and had returned home safely, what would you tell her about the past 20 years? In her powerful letter “Twenty Years Later,” Judy Sutton Taylor fills her friend in.

“I’m thinking about you again today. But of course I’m thinking about you; it’s December 21, 2008. It’s the twentieth anniversary of the day you died. Twenty years, too, since you were twenty years old. I’m back at Syracuse University this weekend, with Michele and some other friends, to remember you and to commemorate the day that changed the rest of our lives. Even after all these years, though, I don’t just think of you during ceremonies and anniversaries. I think of you all the time. The last time I saw you, during our junior year, we all slept at my parents’ place in NYC after we rang in New Year’s 1988 with Michele and a bunch of other friends. I was about to leave for a semester in London, for the same program you were going to participate in the following September. We talked a little that night about how psyched we both were, but I didn’t think much about our conversation until later. None of us knew then, of course, that this particular New Year’s would be your last. Let me tell you, a lot happens between twenty and forty. Of course I thought about you through engagements and weddings and the births of babies. I thought of you when Michele and I shared phone calls about job promotions and buying houses and doing grownup stuff. I thought about you when we dealt with miscarriages, separations, divorces, and the deaths of other friends too soon. During my darker moments, I thought about how it might just be better to live twenty great years and end it there, instead of dealing with all the drama and ugliness of adulthood…”

JUDY SUTTON TAYLOR lives with her family in Chicago, where she’s the kids editor at Time Out Chicago. She also writes about food and fitness. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Cooking Light, Self, Good Housekeeping, and Chicago magazine. Her semester abroad, way back when, gave her a permanent itch to travel, and she’s been lucky enough to mix work with pleasure by contributing to guidebooks for Fodor’s, Mobil, Gault Millau, and Little Black Book. Her essay “Twenty Years Later” is for Michele, who always joked that her parents could only afford one “l” and whom she talks with often…and always on December 21.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Thank you to Judy for sharing your personal story with us and putting up with my many nosy questions about a tragic topic. Judy will be reading her letter at our Chicago event, check out the events page for all the details!

Read the rest of Judy’s letter, and 35 others, in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, now available at a bookstore near you (or on Amazon!)

author spotlight: Gabrielle Studenmund

If you had a chance to warn yourself of a tragic accident, what would you say? Gabrielle Studenmund bravely and poignantly pens a letter to herself seven years ago in “A Voice From the Future.”

“I’m writing to you from your future. And I have some bad news for you. It has to do with your obsession with fitness. It’s dangerous. Don’t you already know that you are fast and strong? Do you really have to push yourself by taking on a half-Ironman triathlon? I know, I know. You are a talented swimmer–your team even won high school state championships. And combined with your new love of running marathons, a triathlon may appear to be the right thing to do. Yes, your dear boyfriend Wayne has indulged your fitness fantasies by giving you a Trek bicycle, just like the one your hero, Lance Armstrong, rides for his Tour de France championships. But you need to ignore those signs that suggest your next race should be a triathlon. Think about it. You finally got what you’ve wanted for all these years: a position as senior editor at a national magazine. Do not push yourself further just because you think it will yield the physique of your dreams and make for a great article to the loyal readers of SELF magazine. Go out and celebrate your three-year anniversary with your gorgeous blind-date-turned-live-in-boyfriend, Wayne. Enjoy a relaxing dinner with him instead of stressing out about having to get up early to cycle with your dear friends Laurel, Ramon, Alyssa, and Crispy. Because here’s what happens. The day after your anniversary with Wayne, you get up early in the morning. You go to meet your friends for a bike ride. And you have a devastating accident. One that will end your life as a prominent magazine editor. One that will end your relationship with Wayne. One that will erase a year or so of your memories. One that will give you permanent brain injury. One that will force you to leave the city you love and have succeeded in. It’s an accident that will end your life as you know it, and that will nearly end your life altogether. You will lie in a coma for ten days with a breathing tube that leaves a lifelong scar. You will shatter your left elbow. It will take you months to learn how to balance again. Your brain damage will leave you with an inability to concentrate, to the point where when you call someone, you hope to remember who it is you’re calling by the time they answer the phone. What I wouldn’t do to be able to actually send you this letter. To make sure you receive it. To warn you…”

GABRIELLE STUDENMUND has written for Self, Shape, Fitness and Glamour magazines. She is a former fitness editor at Self and was an editor at SportsforWomen.com and American Health magazine. After a serious bike accident in 2002, she now earns disability and lives in Southern Pines, North Carolina, with her cat, Lucy. She has recently started writing again for a local publication, Pinestraw magazine. She hopes to get more freelance magazine assignments and plans to one day write a memoir about becoming disabled and her journey to recovery. Gabrielle graduated with honors from the University of Wyoming in 1998, with a degree in journalism and a minor in women’s studies.

NOTE FROM EDITOR: A special thank you to my friend Gabby, who readily agreed when I asked her to share her story for the book, and willingly put up with my many pesky and nosy questions as we worked on this. (Not to mention, for being one of the most enthusiastic contributors!) I can’t wait for her best-selling memoir to hit the shelves!

Read the rest of Gabrielle’s letter, and 35 others, in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, which officially came out TODAY!

author spotlight: Jane Hodges

Have you ever had a “misery loves company” friend who turns on you when you’re, well, not quite as miserable anymore? As Jane Hodges explains in “Collateral Damage,” in those cases, sometimes it’s okay to let a friendship go…

“At first I felt bad about not inviting you to my wedding last summer. But as time has passed, I’ve become more comfortable with that decision–and what the decision really concerns, which is this: After twenty years, we are no longer friends. You bailed on me. For most of the time we’ve known one another, I’ve held love relationships in higher esteem than you have. Dating was always an important but impossible goal for me, something I knew I needed to do to grow as a person, something that I knew would be hard for me (crazy family, hello) but necessary. But as you know, until 2004 the men I tried dating were like a rare species of bird that I briefly spotted and held on my arm before they sank their claws in to get lift-off, resuming their migration toward women who mattered more to them than I ever would. They were lessons about my insignificance to the people whose approval I most wanted, tests of self-esteem I was no stranger to. Comments like ‘You know I don’t love you’ and ‘My therapist says I’m just sleeping with you to get back at my ex-wife’ and, my personal favorite, ‘I haven’t been very nice to you, and you haven’t gotten upset enough about it–I really think you need to go to a therapist.’ But that didn’t make me turn my back on relationships with men. It wasn’t that I felt that relationships were impossible. They just weren’t possible with the men I’d chosen thus far. You always seemed amused by my dating stories, supportive but firm in your position as conscientious objector to the whole energy-sucking, insecurity-generating business of attempted couple-dom. You didn’t judge my interest in finding love, sex, companionship, or some mix of the three. You just thought it was a funny affliction that I, an otherwise sensible woman, indulged. Maybe I never noticed that as long as I was failing at love, my investments in the acts surrounding it were okay with you. I guess I should have realized that my arrival at the doorstep of a good relationship would bother you. So as I began planning my wedding, thinking about a passage in my life and who I wanted around me–who is there for me and why, who isn’t and why–I stepped back and asked a different question about you and your disappearance. I stopped questioning why you had stopped talking to me and what I might have done to cause that, and I began asking myself why I cared…”

JANE HODGES is a freelance writer in Seattle. Her fiction has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, and she has published essays in Single State of the Union: Single Women Speak Out on Life, Love and the Pursuit of Happiness (Seal Press, 2007) and The Seattle Weekly. Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Business 2.0, on msnbc.com and The Seattle Times, and many other print and online publications. She feels guilty every day about her unfinished novel and the loans she took out for an MFA in creative writing, and when she’s not reading fiction or a day-old newspaper, she’s reading friends’ tarot cards. She’s a loyal friend–but nobody puts Baby in a corner. Visit her at www.janehodges.net.

EDITOR’S NOTE: For those in the Pacific Northwest area, Jane will be reading at both the Portland and Seattle bookstore events, woo hoo (and this editor is mighty interested in perhaps putting those tarot cards to use during our respective house-guesting visits for just such events–do I dare?)

Read the rest of Jane’s letter, and 35 others, in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, now available on Amazon!

author spotlight: Katie Arnold

As outdoors maven Katie Arnold proves in “The Mother of All Adventures,” sometimes when it comes to friends who are there for you every step of a trail run or hike (or climb up a sheer rock wall), you just can’t narrow it down to one…

“We learned to roll kayaks and cast flies together. We dug dummies out of the snow at avalanche school; watched the full moon set as the sun rose over Utah’s Canyonlands; cranked through steep, dusty single-track in Idaho; paddled desert rivers on the longest day of the year; nursed heartbreak and flirted with surf instructors in Hawaii. When we were ten, we learned to sail in our soggy Tretorns, dragging each other onto the hull like waterlogged mink after the boat capsized. You convinced Steve and me to tag along on your backcountry honeymoon, and I talked you into going fly-fishing with me a week before Pippa was born. (In retrospect, one of my dumber ideas.) We’ve chased after-work mountain bike rides with margaritas, raced all night long in Moab, and spent entire long days swimming in the lake. When I sliced my knee open on the trail and had to fashion a baggy little tourniquet out of my T-shirt, you were the first person I called from the hospital pay phone. I had just moved to Santa Fe and barely knew you. “Uh, I fell while hiking and need a ride home,” I said lamely. “I’m on my way,” you told me, and when you walked into the waiting room, it was like seeing my oldest, dearest friend in the world. “Next time we’ll go together,” you said. And we did. Together, we’ve had plenty of close calls, both real and imagined. Who can forget all the times we were caught out in thunderstorms and nearly electrocuted? (Exaggeration, maybe, but you know how phobic I am.) “Please take care of Gus,” I begged you during one particularly lunatic mission, as we huddled with our bikes on a high ridge, trying to remember how not to get zapped. Do you stand under a tree, or near a tree, or in the open? Do you lie flat or crouch with one leg in the air, to keep the current from forming a circuit? How is it that we still don’t know this? “Of course,” you said magnanimously, even though you’re allergic to dogs. “And you can have my cat.”

KATIE ARNOLD is a freelance writer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her stories have appeared in Outside, Travel & Leisure, ESPN The Magazine, The New York Times, and Sunset, among other magazines. She has profiled Native-American actor and activist Russell Means, BASE jumper Dean Potter, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and fashion icon Tom Ford. Her feature about world-champion freestyle kayaker and entrepreneur Eric Jackson, “Alpha Geek,” received honorable mention in Best American Sports Writing 2008. Her travels have taken her to Australia, Iceland, the South Pacific, Europe, and throughout North America. In the field, she’s partial to total-immersion reporting: While on assignment, she once ran a marathon; another time, she accidentally climbed Yosemite’s Half Dome. She’s currently at work on a collection of short stories.

Read the rest of Katie’s letter, and 35 others, in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, now available on Amazon!

author spotlight: Claire Murphy

If you’ve ever had a friend dump you out of the blue, leaving you wonder “Was It Something I Said?” you’ll relate to Claire Murphy’s letter as she wrestles with her feelings after being drop-kicked by “the mean girl”…

“You have moved on. This I know. Still, I can’t help but wonder: Did the end of our friendship cause you a single moment’s sadness? Did you lose even an hour’s sleep? If you knew how many nights I used to lie awake wondering what I did, what I said to cause you to drift away, you’d probably…I don’t know. Laugh? Roll your eyes? Think I’m crazy? Because here’s where I get confused: There was no betrayal, no fight, no tears. One day our three-year friendship was just over. I still wonder, three years later: How could we have been friends-for-life one week and not speaking the next? You were–are–always the popular girl. At the top of everyone’s guest list. Me? I’ve always been squarely on the middle rung of the social ladder. Well liked, but certainly never the life of the party. You were–are–also the mean girl. I couldn’t admit it then, but I certainly witnessed it. You were utterly dismissive of people who didn’t measure up to your standards of cool and collected. The messiness of the lives of people we both knew provoked nothing but scorn from you. Here’s what I think happened: When my own life started to get messy, and I trusted that I could reveal to you the difficulties I was facing, things shifted….”

CLAIRE MURPHY is the pseudonym of a writer who lives in the West. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times and O.

Read more of Claire’s letter, and 35 others, in P.S. What I Didn’t Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends, now available on Amazon!