A letter to Paul Auster

Dear Mr. Auster,

I first read Leviathan as a student living and studying in Dijon, France. My mother was a French teacher at a small rural public school in upstate NY, and having grown up speaking the language it seemed a fitting course of study given my general lack of early twenty-something direction. At the time, I was boarding with a dysfunctional French family, the Bresseau’s, who were each on their second marriage. They had a rambunctious young demon son between the two of them and an older introverted son, with an all-consuming passion for comic books and mid-90’s rock music, from Madame Bresseau’s previous marriage. Dinners were always interesting, a breeding ground for awkwardly priceless moments. To avoid prolonged contact with this cast of characters, whose idiosyncrasies I scribbled furiously into my journal, I spent the evenings locked in my bedroom. Having grown tired of the bread and butter staples of French literature that I had been assigned to read, I rescued three English books from the Bresseau’s bookshelf and read them back to back to back as quickly as possible. I read your novel first and then moved on to the first two Harry Potter books. Madame was an English ex patriot, Leviathan happened to be one of her favorites.

I’ve read most of your novels, having enjoyed every word of each of them.
But it wasn’t until this past year, when I picked up Hand to Mouth that I felt the need to write you. My father is a small town jack-of-all-trades. He does snow removal in the winter and builds furniture in the summer. He doesn’t like people and recently began playing the banjo during what I’d like to call his third mid-life crisis. The first was forgetting that my mother and my two younger siblings existed once I moved away from home, and the second was trying to play the upright bass. He plays the banjo every Sunday afternoon at the deli in town with Tom “Buckshot” Butler on bass and the cross-dressing Steve Sverchek on fiddle. Steve is the father of the girl I thought was my first real girlfriend. She eventually informed me that we weren’t dating at all.

My mother is a prim and proper, pessimistic, tiny conservative woman from
Anderson, South Carolina. She became a French teacher to escape the grips of the poor rural south. If she couldn’t physically leave, this was second best. We didn’t own a television so instead I was raised on NPR and trips to the book mobile.

I’ve always enjoyed telling stories and feel confident telling you that I’m a filmmaker working on creating my first narrative short. I have worked on documentary shorts and features for the past few years. Your ability to describe characters, places, and situations is truly inspiring. It was while reading the Brooklyn Follies that I discovered the urgent desire and need to begin remembering the people and places of my youth, a place and time that I once long ago swore to forget.

There is no doubt in my mind that you will continue to write, so I don’t have to implore you to do so. I look forward to reading more of your work in the future. You have inspired me, and for that I should like to say thank you.

Sincerely,

Rod Blackhurst