A return to writing letters
I hope this finds you well
Where shall I begin? Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first? ~Jane Austen, letter to sister Cassandra, 1808
Hello! Welcome to Lover/Fighter, where you’ll find unflinching feminist polemic and political analysis AND writing about the silly little things that make us all human.
In an attempt to combat the scourge of the online world and its impact on our attention spans, I will be sending monthly PHYSICAL letters to my paid subscribers. These are handwritten letters written over four weeks and posted out at the end of each month.
If you like the idea of receiving a personalised monthly letter that isn’t a bill or something you bought because an AI generated ad made you think a $29 cream could reverse the natural aging process, then this is for you.
Details are at the bottom of this post, which you can also find by clicking here.
A monthly paid subscription costs $12AUD, and includes all postage fees.
This past Saturday marked the 19th anniversary of my mother’s death. It’s astonishing to think she’s been gone for almost two decades, given she only left us yesterday. She still appears as clear as day in my mind’s eye, and I can hear the exact cadence of her voice. I can smell the different vintages of her skin, from that ever so slightly sour-sweet scent we all have in the morning to the cream she layered on after a shower and the various perfumes she had lined up on her dressing table. Even all these years later, a waft of Guerlain’s Insolence will cause me to stop whatever I’m doing and commune with the dead. It may only last for a second or two, but the moment of prayer itself feels like a pilgrimage to somewhere rare and special.
She is gone and always will be. She is here and never left.
This strange elasticity of time and temporal space is just one of the many paradoxes I’ve been introduced to by Grief. As all people walking this path have found, I sometimes forget her death entirely. I might read something interesting or be reminded of an in-joke we shared and think to myself, I must call her and tell her. It used to seem like a cruel joke to me, the forgetting-only-to-remember forcing one to reckon over and over with the loss of a something that feels impossible to live without.
But I have learned so much from Grief, not least of which is that even the pain of death can find its way to feeling pleasurable. The forgetting is an act of resurrection. For the briefest sliver of time, the dead and the living get to reunite. To touch the untouchable, to exist in the infinite.
I have become very philosophical about death and what it means to exist in two separate planes. And although people say they don’t believe in magic, trust me when I say the motherless hear all their pleas. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost my mother, they’ll say. I don’t think I could survive without her. Sometimes I think they like to inspect the walking wounded up close, like neighbourhood kids knocking on the door of a scary house to prove that it can’t hurt them.
But the truth is, Death can and does take indiscriminately. And when it happens to you, survival is the only way forward. You can and will be okay, and you’ll see them again. As Waxahatchee sings in ‘St. Cloud’, I guess the dead just go on living/at the darkest edge of space.
One of the places I find my mother now is in two suitcase of her old letters that I’ve been carrying around with me since she died. The bigger one’s straps have all but disintegrated, and I can only move it by hooking my thumbs through two metal rings on the case’s handle and propelling it slowly forward as if it were a toddler I was teaching to walk. The smaller one is more like an old make up case, and its handles are intact. They’ve followed me through one interstate and seventeen house moves. Weirdly, it has never occurred to me to find a better storage solution for them or to even amalgamate them into one box. Maybe it’s because the threadbare cases themselves seem to be as much part of the ephemera as the years worth of letters they contain.
All of them are evidence of a life. They’re proof that this woman existed, and that people were around to see it. I can track parts of who she was before she became a mother, and the moment when that changed and her life expanded and contracted at the same time. Amidst the cards celebrating birthdays and babies are letters my siblings and I sent her during the two years we (inexplicably) were sent halfway across the world to boarding school. I was eight, and desperately unhappy about it all.
Can you tell?
Lately, I’ve been reading some of the letters my father wrote to her after they first met. An abundance of romantic, heartfelt, magical yearnings into which he’s poured all his longing and hope, each one a promise she must have read and re-read ten times over. When I found them, they were bundled in a neat pile and tied with a ribbon.
I no longer speak to my father, but the letters he wrote almost fifty years ago have helped in some small way to tend to the wound of our estrangement: meeting the person he was when he was so much younger than I am now has helped me to a way to find tenderness for him, or at least the him that he used to be. In many ways, he is as dead to me now as she is, but these letters have shown me where to find him in the darkest edge of space.
I’m glad she kept them.
There’s a magic to letter writing
And so back to this increased pull I have towards letters - not just to the writing of them, but also to holding them, re-reading them and then finally sending them on their way. I miss letters. I miss what they represent, which isn’t just the conversation between people separated by distance but also the longing humans have for the evidence of their own existence. We write letters to people we love (and sometimes people we hate) in part because as a way of disseminating enough of our stories and words to the people we love so that we might be remembered by them if and when we’re gone.
Before the internet (and even for a short time after it), I was a prolific letter writer. Letters home from school, letters to friends I’d left behind during all the countless moves, letters and notes passed in class with muffled giggles, letters to crushes shared only with my diary. I once wrote a letter to Nancy Cartwright asking her if she wanted to be friends, because I had a crush on Bart Simpson and I assumed she must have been the same age as me.
This is not a letter. It is only my arms around you for a quick minute.
- Katherine Mansfield in a letter to Leslie Beauchamp
So many letters! And so many sent to me in return. I have them all in a box in my wardrobe. Little insights into the girl I used to be, who still feels so much like the middle aged woman I am now. She has been loved, that girl. Not always by me, but by people who cared enough to put into words how they felt about her. Sometimes I read them, and remind myself how lucky I am to have been given the chance to explore so many different possibilities of life.
I don’t want to be a doomsdayer, but I worry about what the death of letters will do to our collective ability to remember. Everyone wants to be seen these days, but very few people want to be perceived. Leaving curated imprints of the self on social media is not the same thing as documenting a life, your life, and it can’t possibly create the same kind of connections between people.
Text messages might provide receipts and I love a scandal-ridden group chat as much as the next messy gossip, but think of how wonderful it is to also read archived letters from a bygone era. I don’t want the primary archival evidence of my middle years to be found in the hundreds of daily messages sent back and forth in my Bitches Of Eastwick (members: three).
From a link I sent of women pretending to be men taking selfies.
It’s not that I think these things don’t represent us. If anything, communicating via memes and shorthand probably represents humanity best of all (or at least, as well as anything else). It’s not like past generations were any better or smarter than us, it’s just that the clever things inside their head weren’t being elbowed out by the shittest hot takes you can imagine and an ever increasing list of influencers you did not ask to learn about.
I sometimes wish that I had been born in some obscure corner of the world…In Iceland, perhaps, or some South Sea Island, where one could live a normal life without being part of the great insane world struggles.
– Sylvia Plath, from a letter to Hans-Joachim Neupert c. November 1951
RIP Sylvia, you would have fucking hated Nara Smith.
If I have to see one more fucking piece of AI swill on this godforsaken app…
Then there’s the AI of it all. I see people sharing the most transparently generated slop on this platform and pretending they wrote it themselves while people fall over in the comments to gush about how brilliant it is.
Thank you!!!!!!! the prompt writer replies, collecting their praise with magnanimous delight.
It took me awhile to learn all the tells of AI, and now I can’t unsee them. Guys, the writing is bad. It’s really, really bad. It stinks, in fact.
“Your AI generated writing might be human shaped, but there is no breath inside the body. It cannot press its forehead to my own and fervently hope to communicate somehow the depth of life that courses within. It will never look at the seemingly insurmountable distance that lies between the language it knows and the one it can speak, and yet still decide to run as fast as it can towards the edge and leap like hell towards the other side.”
It’s swamping the landscape, and I can’t get away from the stench. What does it even mean to be a writer these days when half the people calling themselves that don’t even think the writing part is all that necessary?
I refuse. I am REFUSING to be a part of it! Hollywood cunts can try and shove AI inevitability down my throat all they like, I’ll just go back to performing plays in my living room like the good old days I don’t give a fuck. The fucking multi millionaire actresses telling us all to get on board the drain trAIn if we don’t want to “miss the future” are the same ones working overtime to keep their human flesh suit firmly frozen in the path while hoping we won’t notice they’re starting to look like wax candles left out in the sun. At best, they’re pushing for audiences to embrace AI in the hopes that being a Good Company Girl will pay off in terms of casting (because you can do anything with AI, including making Demi Moore look like she’s Margaret Qualley’s age again.) At worst, they’re just spruiking for the newest entry in their stock portfolio.
But I digress.
Speaking of vanity…
I want to write letters again, because they remind me of a time when thoughts were allowed to be slow and communication didn’t have to be hurried. I want to enjoy writing in a medium that doesn’t ask me to be anything other than honest, and that won’t find ways to ‘gamify’ the experience by rewarding me with likes or punishing me with disinterest. I want to remember what writing feels like when I do it by hand, and allow thoughts to flow without concern for grammar or word counts or the wretched modern curse of hyperscrutiny that cannot help but strip the courage out of us all. I want to write something that has to be folded, sealed and stamped and then sent off to find its audience in private.
I gotta slow down, or I might go mad for real.
The currency of social media, with its verified ticks and like, follow and share counts has harmed me on some fundamental level and I don’t think I’m the only one. I read an interview with Bryan Cranston recently, and he compared the impact of being permanently attached to our phones and the 24/7 ‘connection’ they weld us to to living in a house filled with asbestos.
I have been slowly breaking free of it, especially since being permanently banned from Instagram. I know it was meant to be a punishment, but I really have to thank the genocide supporting fascists at Meta for kicking me off. Few things have been more freeing to me than realising it means absolutely jack shit fuck all whether or not you have 250,000 ‘followers’ or the social authority supposedly conferred by a blue tick. Conversely, I am DEEPLY EMBARRASSED by the fact I ever thought otherwise. God, what a bunch of dorks.
We have been made to worship at the altar of an algorithm that does not care about us, that isn’t interested in our creativity and that certainly does not want us believing that we can imagine a better world for ourselves than the one it presents to us in bite sized little dopamine hits, little sparkly distractions designed to only just sate our hunger for human connection.
Being off the Narcagram has also made me far less vain. I was looking through my phone the other night to try and find a particular photo, and I realised that I’ve essentially stopped taking selfies. Now that I’m not deep in the cogs of the shallowest machine on earth, I have no real need to waste time and digital space trying to find the perfect angle to properly communicate whatever curated feeling I’m trying to sell (consciously or otherwise) to an audience whose primary purpose is to increase Meta’s share price.
It’s not just selfiepathy. When I was very active on the Dork app, I posted a lot of speak-into-the-camera stories. To be fair to my past self, these were generally educational videos discussing feminist theory, political shit, how to spot propaganda etc etc etc, and so I stand by the fact they had more value than your average GRWM (which I also did a bit of during Covid).
Educational or not, I can see that the feedback loop one gets from staring at themselves for hours each day is damaging. How are we meant to snap ourselves out of the terminally boring OBSESSION so many of us have with our own faces and how they do or do not measure up to ‘standards’ if all we do is stare at them all day long?
We have been trained to look at ourselves, but dissuaded from anything that invites us to perceive who we actually are. We need to spend more time contemplating our existential dread and less time trying to figure out how to turn it into a viral post. Fuck, I can’t even listen to sad music anymore because so much of it has been flattened into ‘trending audio’ by fucking slop jockeys masquerading as ‘creatives’.
I am obsessed at nights with the idea of my own worthlessness, and if it were only to turn a light on to save my life I think I would not do it. These are the last footprints of a headache I suppose. Do you ever feel that? — like an old weed in a stream. What do you feel, lying in bed?
- Virginia Woolf in a letter to Vita Sackville-West
And so:
The Clemogram is my attempt to wrestle back some of the humanity and attention I have sacrificed to the shallow realm of content. To write in a different way, with different feeling, and to hopefully offer to whoever is there to receive these missives a kind of love and tenderness and spontaneous expression that can be better found through a letter. I miss letters, but I also miss being excited for the mail to arrive.
If you’ve read this far, thank you and I commend you - our attention spans are all fucked to hell, which is another thing I hope this medium will help to repair.
The key details:
Clemograms will only be available to people with a paid subscription.
It won’t be digitised or shared anywhere online.
Paid subscribers will find a contact form below the paywall here to add their address to my database. It will never be shared with anyone, or seen by anyone but me.
My inaugural Clemogram will be posted at the end of May. I am currently writing it, and so far it is 19 pages of an A5 notebook long.
Because these letters will be written by my physical hand, you can be even more absotively guaranteed that not a single word of them has been generated by AI.
To be on my (physical) mailing list, become a paid subscriber by clicking on the box here. You’ll find the link to the contact form just below the paywall.
With love,
