It begins as an assignment for English class: write a letter to a dead person. Laurel chooses Kurt Cobain – he died young, and so did Laurel’s sister May – so maybe he’ll understand what Laurel is going through.
Soon Laurel is writing letters to lots of dead people – Janis Joplin, Heath Ledger, River Phoenix, Amelia Earhart, Amy Winehouse…It’s like she can’t stop. She writes about her new high school, her new friends, her first love – and her shattered life.
But the ghosts of Laurel’s past can’t be contained between the lines of a page forever. She must face up to them – before they consume her.
So, not exactly a laugh-a-minute then. Was this a winning formula?
Hmm. I’m torn.
On the one hand, Love Letters to the Dead is strikingly honest, inventive, touching and powerful.
On the other hand, I couldn’t immerse myself fully within the writing.
It’s undeniably an inspired (though not original) idea, using popular culture icons to explore the grief and sadness of a lonely teenage girl.
Laurel seemingly chooses the dead celebrity recipients based on her feelings or life experiences that closely relate to theirs in some way. For example, she initially starts off with Kurt Cobain, the frontman to grunge band Nirvana, who led a notoriously troubled life and struggled with his meteoric rise to fame, before committing suicide aged 27. The sisters bonded over Nirvana’s song ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ and furthermore, Laurel feels that Cobain’s broken family life in his earlier years reflects her own situation, making him a useful audience for her thoughts. Laurel connects to Cobain’s music and his angst, hence the letters to him. Clever idea, no? There’s even a good mix of accomplished people on Laurel’s writing list, from Amy Winehouse, to E. E. Cummings, to Jim Morrison, to Elizabeth Bishop. This was definitely a winning aspect of the formula.
However, this is where the first problem becomes evident. Within her letters, as well as discussing her daily life and struggles, Laurel recounts “facts” from the celebrities’ lives (things that you could discover on Wikipedia and gossip websites), resulting in her making assumptions about their feelings: she literally says ‘you must have felt…’ A LOT, which bothered me. These sections didn’t always feel authentic to me and often they were just a way to start a letter before Laurel would go off on a tangent about her day at school. Yes it was necessary to provide some background and a foundation of knowledge regarding the celebrities (like I did above), but some of the links felt tenuous at times. Instead of going with the flow, I found myself thinking ‘how could you possibly know what was going on for them? It’s YOUR perceptions’. It felt VERY presumptuous.
The other problem? Laurel has sudden sparks of philosophical thoughts, or poetic phrases, some of which were really stunning and thought-provoking. However, a lot of the time, I found myself questioning whether a fifteen year old girl would come up with such things, in between adoring her new friends and love interest Sky in a childlike, simple way. The way she flips from blindingly obvious immaturity to a woman much older than her years is baffling. Also, the way some of the sentences are structured can be severely annoying (commas, anyone?). Again, maybe I’m just too old and cynical for this book.
Despite my many misgivings, I finished Love Letters to the Dead in two lengthy reading sessions. It’s absorbing, it pulls you in and carries you along on the melancholic wave of a teenager’s broken life. The epistolary structure of the book works very well and the flashbacks of Laurel’s relationship with May is realistic and filled with some very beautiful, loving moments. The strength of the book probably lies in Laurel’s reminiscences of life with her sister, as these are the most heartfelt and the most honest. Laurel’s hidden secrets and pain are well handled and gradually become clearer as the book progresses, rather than being a poorly managed revelation at the very end.
Something that needed work? Laurel’s relationship with Sky. It felt quite superficial. It felt too quick. I didn’t feel a true spark. Some definite exploration and lengthier interactions were needed there.
Overall: Confused. A perfect word to sum up this book. A confused narrator; a confused writing style which flips between immaturity and childish sentence structure, to suddenly becoming very grand, imaginative and poetic; confusing relationships (I’m looking at you Sky); annoyingly confusing inclusions of celebrity facts which don’t always lead anywhere and are full of presumptions. However, it’s thought-provoking. It’s emotive. It’s captivating. Some parts are very profound. What does all of this mean? As a reader, I’m confused too. There.