Dear Harper Lee

Harper Lee’s 2015 publication

Dear Harper Lee (and all your editors and publishers, both past and present),

Thank you for your brilliance. Thank your for sharing your insights, experiences and observations of southern life, and a troubled period of our nation’s history, in a way that brings us in with unsettling, heartbreaking honesty, but also with tenderness, humor, and profound grace.

Thank you for To Kill a Mockingbird, a book which touched my young and developing soul and helped shape my character, my life. A book which has shaped generations and will continue to hold a mirror before our eyes, forcing us to see who we are and who we would be.

And thank you for Go Set a Watchman. Your reluctance to share it with the world is understandable. First drafts, second drafts, third, fifth, tenth. They are wrenching, painful works in progress.