Dear Charlie

Dear Charlie is narrated by an unnamed woman in her mid-thirties whose obsessive pursuit of a wealthy, elusive amateur poet develops alongside her mother’s cancer treatment and her own escalating psychiatric crisis. The book initially resembles a darkly comic account of modern dating and literary ambition, but gradually reveals itself as the retrospective reconstruction of a prolonged manic and psychotic episode. The narrator’s intelligence, wit and remarkable verbal fluency make her compelling, yet her version of events becomes increasingly unreliable as ordinary rejection is transformed into destiny, strangers become conspirators or soulmates and her unfinished novel assumes the status of a world-changing masterpiece.

In November 2017, the narrator is dividing her nights between her great-aunt Ramona’s Beacon Hill condominium and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where her mother is receiving treatment for advanced epithelial ovarian cancer. Her father, a neurologist, shares the night nursing. The narrator refuses to return to her childhood home while her mother is hospitalised because she superstitiously believes that doing so might cause her mother to die there.

Her friend Ingrid introduces her by telephone to Charles Hunnewell Gaines, known as Charlie. He is the best friend and rent-free loftmate of the wealthy heir to an international art gallery. Charlie possesses an old American name, family money, a cultivated eccentricity and apparently unlimited freedom to travel. From November until January, he and the narrator speak for hours, often in the middle of the night. Charlie listens to her stories, sends her poetry and presents himself through a collection of flamboyant anecdotes involving divorced parents, guns, kidnapping, psychedelic pilgrimages, heroin-addicted girlfriends, car crashes, pornography and the burden of having a trust fund.