It was a gift that took eighteen years to make and no more than a few minutes to give.
Was the giving momentous enough? Did my son, Hudson, love it with every molecule in his body? Did I feel it had been worth all of the work involved? What did I expect? I don’t think I actually thought through what the occasion would feel like. I definitely joked to myself that it could be a huge flop, or possibly a very polite one.
To know how a funny, music-making, academically blasé, clothing-obsessed eighteen-year-old might respond to anything is nearly impossible, even if that eighteen-year-old is constitutionally open-minded. When Hudson was about ten, I asked him what his last meal request would be if he were about to be executed. “You can have anything you want,” I said. “Sky’s the limit!” There was a very long, thoughtful pause, and then he said, brightly, “Surprise me!” But he can also be very opinionated, mostly about music, and occasionally, when I play him a song in the car that I think is incredibly cool, he gives it only a bar or two before turning it off with a firm “No.” I couldn’t possibly predict how this present would go over.
I had been writing my son a letter every year for his birthday, but, instead of giving him one a year, I had held on to the letters, waiting to give them to him all at once, when he turned eighteen.
My son didn’t know about the Eighteen Letters Project, as I called it (even though it was technically nineteen letters, the first one having been written when he was in utero). My father, a writer, didn’t know about it, and Liz, my older sister and best friend, didn’t either. I told almost no one because I figured that it would be a huge bummer to keep this surprise for seventeen and a half years and then have someone accidentally ruin it. But mostly it didn’t come up, like a lot of things you do as a single mom. No one sees you working on your December birthday letter—there are endless particulars that no one knows about your life. You get to do whatever you want as a solo parent, but you do it all unwitnessed.
The project began in our apartment, on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. I was eight months pregnant and getting very excited to meet my baby boy or girl—I didn’t know the sex—so I wrote the baby a letter:
I didn’t imagine that it would be the beginning of an eighteen-year project, but that’s what happened. We moved to Los Angeles when Hudson was just six weeks old, and, unfortunately, his father and I ended up divorcing when he was around four. We shared custody; I had Hudson for half the week. For the most part, I tried to document the everyday happenings, reasoning that he would probably remember the big stuff—the trip the two of us took to China when he was five, the plays we put on every summer in a barn in Vermont. I wanted him to remember how he loved experimenting with style and personas. For his eighth birthday, I wrote, “The other day you came home from school and said, ‘You wanna have a character party?’ (We call everything a party—a reading party, etc.) I said, ‘Hell yeah!’ and as I was cooking you came into the kitchen in five different costumes/characters. A football player, a watch thief in a trenchcoat, a Polish ballet dancer, a guy from Jersey with slicked back hair who owns a boat shop and a wizard with bad eyesight.” Hudson had a knack for always finding something positive to say. From the fourteenth-birthday letter: “When you were eating some tofu thing I made, you were trying to be sweet and you said, “I like this. I like it because it’s not TOO flavorful, you know what I mean?”
Over the years, I worked on the letters knowing that no one was seeing what I was writing, which wasn’t all that different from my early days as a writer. Until my mid-thirties, the odds of being published seemed insurmountable. I desperately wanted to be read, but I never knew if my work would be seen by anyone other than my sister. And then, eventually, I had some success and was in a position where I could count on my work being read by someone. Sometimes that meant a few friends, my agent, and an editor who would end up rejecting it, but, still, the work was seen. This project took me to an entirely new place as a writer, where the lack of readership was actually the whole point.
And then, suddenly, my son’s eighteenth birthday was approaching very quickly, and I found myself scrambling to proofread, edit, and format all the letters on my laptop. I started to feel inexplicably nervous, but I reassured myself that if the gift bombed, I could be pretty sure it would kill in thirty-two years, when he was fifty. Maybe his partner or kids would read the letters and laugh at the stories in them, the details of his childhood in L.A. In this way, maybe the project would mean more to him as time went on. In “Toy Story,” Buzz and Woody and the gang long to be played with by a child because they only feel fully alive when they are used. Things that we return to again and again and at different stages in our life have, perhaps, an exalted place in our hearts now, as books and music and experiences become more and more disposable, single-use. Terms like “well-worn,” “beloved,” “dog-eared” suggest a kind of love that is earned through time and repetition.
I realized that I didn’t want to just print out the letters and hand Hudson a stack of paper. I needed to find a bindery. The woman I ended up working with seemed a little disorganized but very passionate. I knew that she was the one the minute I walked into her cramped lair on Melrose, her lunch in Tupperware containers on a big, crowded drafting table, because her personality seemed to be an exact reflection of her website’s appointment policy: “Please call for an appointment, but walk-ins are usually fine.” Charlene had an initially huffy, don’t-you-know-who-I-am tone, but then she smiled, the entire façade collapsed, and she was happy to do whatever I wanted. I could relate. I usually lay out a big or controversial opinion, but if someone has a better idea, or just wants to do it a different way, I’m totally fine with it, like an extremely opinionated pushover.
Charlene suggested a Japanese stab binding in which several holes are made in the front and back covers and then thread is sewn through the holes, binding the pages and leaving an exposed spine. We spent some time choosing the right thread. She showed me waxed and polished linen thread in addition to embroidery thread in beautiful, rich colors. I knew that my son would love the tactile, handmade aesthetic of the stab binding, but it is fragile. In the end, I decided on a more traditional bound book—I wanted a chance for it to last. We chose a speckly, nubby, light-blue linen cover with black endpapers and a magenta bookmark ribbon. Charlene proposed debossing his initials on the cover. I worried that he might think that was cheesy, and declined. She said, “Great, because we absolutely don’t have time to monogram.”
Charlene told me that she began bookbinding more than thirty years ago, mostly so that she could get into book repair, which is what she really loves. I liked the idea that if you make something good, then it becomes something worth taking care of, thereby imbuing it with longevity. And when, inevitably, it gets beat up by use and by life, you get it repaired. I hoped that we were making something good, something to steward through time, through readings and rereadings, the wear of love.
When I picked up the book, a week later, she said, gruffly, in a Fran Lebowitz voice, “Look, I hope you don’t mind, but I read a little bit of it. I mean, come on. Really, really cool.” I thanked her and said that my son would love what she had made. It felt as if we were two people in the same business. She conserved memories; I documented them.
The night before Hudson’s birthday, we had a party at the house, and a few of his close friends—Viggo, Jhianna, and Sabine—spent the night. The next morning, his actual birthday, I was slightly disappointed that other people would be there. Should I wait until they had gone? Nah, I thought. I’ve waited eighteen years! I made my usual Dutch baby for the crew, and when they were finished eating I told Hudson that I wanted to give him his “big present.” As soon as I said “big present,” I regretted it. THIS is the big present? A book? Of LETTERS? I worried, irrationally (they’re nice kids), that one of his friends might ruin the whole shebang with a horrible teen-ager comment, like “Where’s your real present?”
Viggo, Jhianna, and Sabine gathered around the table to watch him open it. I was weird-crying. “What is my problem?” I kept saying, while realizing that his friends had no idea what my problem was. I held the wrapped book in my hands, trying to give it some context before he opened it. Maybe I was crying because of the physical release of a long buildup, maybe I was crying because it meant so much to me, or maybe I was crying because finishing the project meant finishing his childhood.
It was a piece of writing that was so different from anything I had ever written. I had worked on it at any point in the year when I felt lost, when I felt discouraged by Hollywood, when I didn’t know how I would pay the rent, when I couldn’t face other stuff. It became a testament to something larger, a goal, an act of service, a habit that walked me to where I needed to be. I did it when I wanted to get details down before I forgot them—funny things Hudson said, things we did together, observations of who he was as he grew and changed.
He was dead quiet unwrapping it. His friends were silent, too. No one knew exactly what it was. I could see, as he read the first letter, that he got it. “Oh, my God, Mom. Oh, my God,” he said, standing up from the table and hugging me for a long time. He sat back down at the table with the book, his friends standing on both sides of him, like bookends, reading parts aloud, which I didn’t expect to happen. It was his now. His friends laughed and sighed. Viggo, a great kid, looked sort of wistful and occasionally said, “Damn, bro, so cool.” As I made more coffee, they continued reading pages, laughing about certain entries, like the e-mail a twelve-year-old Hudson wrote a teacher at his old school when she wouldn’t let him into a weekend dance because he wasn’t a student there anymore. (“Dear EX-favorite teacher, I’m sorry that I couldn’t get in. I’m sorry I’m such an amazing dancer.”)
We haven’t talked about it since his birthday. The book is up in his room—I don’t know where exactly. It has gone back into the private realm. Only now it’s his project to watch over, not mine. Maybe in eighteen years he’ll be bringing it to Charlene to repair.
Writers have a lot of ego, a not-at-all-new fact. The desire to be acknowledged, respected, admired, is undeniable. But, for me, to give my child my most meaningful and longest project—not in page count but in years—was the complete opposite of my experience as a working writer. We tend to want to professionalize creativity, to monetize it, and also to aim for as big an audience as we can possibly reach. But my best work as a writer has been for the smallest audience, an audience of one. ♦
