Dear Samantha Hunt: An Open Letter

I am alive—because

I do not own a House—

Entitled to myself—precise—

And fitting no one else—

Emily Dickinson

Dear Samantha Hunt, 

Thank you for writing The Unwritten Book, for giving this oxymoronic sentence meaning. The way you’ve connected your personal experiences to ideas that belong to all of us brought back my own desire to draw links between events and marvel at life’s synchronicities. I read your beautiful book as an endorsement of our human tendency to note parallels we cannot explain yet sense to be meaningful. 

Thank you as well for introducing me to the term “ghost book.” Never did I see the kinship so clearly between books conceived of but not (yet) written by existing authors and non-existing books invented as fictional elements in an actual work. The question of how such ghost books speak to us is a fascinating one I’d love to explore one day. Now I’ll trace how The Unwritten Book called to me. 

Please think “writer,” not “stalker,” to borrow one of your phrases. 

This is the first time I’m writing a letter to an author I don’t personally know. I’ve left brief messages of praise, but never shared in depth how an author’s work has influenced me. The letters I compose in my mind remain unwritten and possess ghostly lives full of real and imagined connections. It was your own contact with other artists that made me want to write to you for real, and when Miranda July’s short story draft “Dear Samantha Hunt” made its phantom appearance in your book by way of an unauthorized copy, I took this as an encouragement and began making notes in earnest. Even if my written text would never live up to July’s unpublished potential, the temptation to author this ghost story was too great.

My letter to you began when I read about the half-eaten chocolate donut you found amid the dust bunnies. My father died of stomach cancer when he was 53. Fresh orange juice was his favorite drink, and he made my stepmother, brothers, and me promise to drink it regularly in winter as an elixir to stave off death. The juice that one of us had squeezed for him on the day he died and that he couldn’t finish turned green with mold in its stemmed glass. None of us could throw the remainder away. You were so smart to finish your father’s half-eaten donut when you had the chance.

Before you catch me on a mistake and think, “That’s not what I wrote; you’re a careless reader,” I’d like to state that I’m writing from memory. I’m responding to what you’ve whispered into my ears as I walked toward the Medieval castle or stood on the shore of the stillest of lakes. I’m a nomad, staying in places for a few months at a time, and currently live in a small hilltop town in Lazio, Italy. Because I keep my luggage to a minimum, I buy few paper books and consume most work on my phone in e-book or audio editions—a sacrifice my lifestyle demands. I also read whatever my hosts happen to have on their shelves, which adds a welcome and often uncanny element to the mix. Your words in your own spectral voice found me this autumn in the suitable company of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Early Irish Myths and Sagas, Modern Magick, and Italian Witchcraft. I regret not having met my hosts before I moved in. 

When you found the chapters of your father’s unpublished manuscript after his death, you were tempted to finish writing his book. It was such a promising story about people who learn how to fly without wings. But you didn’t know how to end it and created a hybrid instead, shadowing his words with your own. Did you make footnotes on your father’s chapters, or did you put his unedited writing on the righthand pages and your comments on the left? Not having seen the printed version, The Unwritten Book remains partially unreal to me, taking shape in my imagination.

In my early twenties, before I admitted to myself that I wanted to be a writer, I fell in love with the diaries of Etty Hillesum. I felt such a strong connection with her, her self-reflections mirroring my own, that I longed to author the novel she had wanted to write and might have written had she not been murdered in Auschwitz. Her work title, I believe, was The Girl Who Couldn’t Kneel. 

If you were to create a library of ghost books, I’d love to become a member.  

My father died on January 20, 2000, the same day his father died in 1977. This wasn’t a coincidence. My father died with the legal help of his physician and chose that day specifically so the conditions for reuniting with his father after death were as favorable as possible. He neither believed in God nor in ghosts, but he believed in love. 

It’s a challenge to listen to an annotated book such as yours, with so many epigraphs, quotes, and references to other (ghost) books. I often wished I had The Unwritten Book open on my desk so I could see how your powerful paragraphs looked on the page. But there was also something fittingly ephemeral about the experience, your ideas expressed and then gone, consumed by my mind where they lived on, shape-shifting and taking on meanings you never intended. “Mishearing is how I love the world,” you wrote. 

I immensely enjoyed your father’s manuscript. The slow pace that could have been boring had a mesmerizing effect on me. I often dream of flying without wings, think myself into the air as your father wrote, and when I do, I wake up feeling victorious. I secretly believe it’s my superpower and am waiting for it to manifest in real life.

My second novel is about a fictional Belgium author, Eva Zomers, who goes missing in Paris in 1968. I made covers for her ghost books and created a fan site about her work that led some readers to ask me whether they could please borrow my copies of Eva Zomers’s work because they couldn’t find her out-of-print books in secondhand stores. Young as I was at the time (not yet 30 then, not yet 50 now), I already knew I would never be able to write all the stories that floated through me. Attributing novels to Eva Zomers relieved me of some of that pressure. Is that how it is for you, too, when you invent ghost books?

You wrote about starlings. You wrote about your ghostly father as a cardinal bird. Right before my father died, a murmuring of starlings flew very close to our suburban house for a very long time, and I didn’t doubt that they’d come for him, or for all of us, since death can be hardest on the living. After my father died, I kept seeing seagulls in unlikely places far away from any sea—I still do. My father was a sailor. Near where we held his memorial, I passed a dead seagull on my way to a small lake, yet minutes later, on my way back, the bird was gone—resurrected. 

I never gave myself permission to write Hillesum’s ghost book, never seriously considered it. I wasn’t Jewish for one. Someone more appropriate and more established would surely come along to answer Hillesum’s call. When more and more of her people died and she feared she might not survive the war and would therefore never finish the books she felt destined to write, she expressed her belief that all authors are connected and that her diaries containing her worked-through thoughts would help future authors in their creative endeavors. I hope she knows how much this has been true for me. 

One day, before I became a nomad and I lived in Paris, I brought home your novel The Seas from the American Library. I’d never heard of you, but I liked your publisher, Tin House. In your book I found all the inspiration I needed to finish writing a short story that had been giving me trouble. It was about a woman distrustful of all men and diving into the deep with a merman. I admired your very real book, but you as the author remained a ghost to me. For this I apologize. I only discovered you authored The Seas when you mentioned the novel in The Unwritten Book. 

“If I am dead,” you wrote, “the strangeness of existence is momentarily comprehensible.” 

There’s a word for what you describe about devouring other people’s texts and making them our own, about how we forget what we’ve remembered. You probably know this word, but just in case you don’t, I’ll leave it here for you because it’s beautiful: cryptomnesia. It’s a compound of the Greek cryptos (hidden, concealed, secret) and mnesia (memory). Some authors have unintentionally committed plagiarism because they’d forgotten where their ideas originally came from. Who stands near the ink gets black, says classical Chinese wisdom, says Anne Carson in Plainwater. 

How does it make you feel to see some of your phrases come back in my writing? Did I steal them from you or am I giving them another life? An early reader of this text asked: Do you believe Samantha Hunt wants to receive a letter like this?

It pains me that I cannot verify the work title Etty Hillesum gave to her ghost book. Her physical books live in one of the 42 book boxes my husband and I left in a storage facility in Gouda, and e-book or audio editions of her work don’t exist. I enjoy being a nomad, but not living among my books has turned these books into ghosts, and this is a gross injustice. 

The novel I’m working on here in Italy has seen many transformations. What is now a gothic story began as a book in which a long-forgotten memory slowly rises to the surface of my protagonist’s mind, causing her to see signs wherever she goes. But I couldn’t make the book work. Her motivations remained obscure and the plot nonsensical until I revealed how everything fitted together in the end; by that time my beta-readers had long given up. What I had wanted to explore was how much we back-engineer our decisions in life, yet fiction as strange as life can quickly become unbelievable. 

Are there readers of this text, you think, who suspect you or your book don’t exist?

I lingered on a passage about your grandmother changing the meaning of words. You wrote, “The longer I live with books and words, the more I enjoy their erosion. I break them open. I make beaches.” That afternoon, a woman on Substack shared her grandmother story with me as a comment on my grandmother essay. She wrote that her grandmother created a literal beach on Jamaica from imported sand.

We are lichen, as you put it, and so are our ideas. Everything we experience inspires what we create. Gazing out over the reflective lake with your disembodied voice in my ears, your thoughts dividing and multiplying in my brain, the clouds above my head and simultaneously at my feet, I wondered about the water in our bodies and our potential to become 60% of what we see.

My grandmother blames herself for the death of both her children in their early fifties. She conceived them during and right after WWII. She was undernourished, her body not yet ready to give life. When people hear she’s 107 years old, more than the ages of her two children combined, people tell me I have good genes. 

“There are times that life speaks to you in signs, or seems to speak to you in signs, I should say, but as it happens, you assume the signs you perceive are objectively real. Coincidences carry an evident meaning. Articles are printed especially for you. Episodes of déjà vu ring like memories of events that have yet to happen. Even animals deliver forewarnings in languages you suddenly understand. No matter where you look, life is trying to communicate something. In fact, life has been trying to do so for a while and you’ve just been too stupid to notice. But now you’re alert: Everything is connected to everything else.” 

What do you call an excerpt from a ghost book that is trying to become real? Perhaps it’s just a recycled shred like a quotation. 

Recently in Rome, I roamed the modest Pietro Canonica Museum on the immodest Villa Borghese grounds. Not yet knowing who he was, I had admired one of his sculptures a few weeks before in one of those wealthy Italian palaces, Il Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, and was delighted to discover he had his own museum built around his former workshop. Among the massive statues of tsars and busts of polished princesses was one unassuming sculpture of Icarus, half a wing attached to his shoulder. Thinking of your father’s manuscript about flying, I approached, wanting to snap a picture for you. Only then did I notice the sculpture was a model for the real thing Pietro Canonica never made. A ghost sculpture is the more physical cousin of our ghost books in the world. 

Have readers expressed their discontent with you for not finishing your father’s manuscript? Have they asked you to reconsider? You didn’t know how to end it, you said, and left his story hanging in midair. But what better way is there to end a book about flight?

One of my protagonists renames the people in her life after the bird species they behaviorally resemble, and one day she climbs on top of a hill, flaps her arms, and tries to lift off the ground, just like your father’s protagonist. “At midnight, she parts the dream clouds with her hands and flies,” I wrote in another story. 

When looking for your email address to send you this letter, I discovered we were both born on May 15. I share birthdays with several people I know personally, more than statistically normal I think, yet I don’t take this shared day as significant for their relationship with me. But when I was at the Amherst cemetery, crouching at her grave, and learned that Emily Dickinson had been “called back” on May 15, I took this as a stamp of approval. I, a non-poet and non-American, was allowed to finish the book I’d been co-writing about her. 

My father, too, ended up in an urn. When I picked up his ashes from the crematorium in Gouda, they were collected in a gray vessel that I carried in the crook of my arm as you would a newborn baby. I guessed the weight of the ashes to be between 3 and 4 kilos, then imagined them as living flesh. Twenty-two years earlier my father had picked up his newborn baby from the maternity ward of the Gouda hospital, carrying me in the crook of his arm as you would an urn of ashes.

“Living and dying, sorrow and joy, the blisters on my feet and the jasmine behind the house, the persecution, the unspeakable horrors: it is all as one in me, and I accept it all as one mighty whole and begin to grasp it better if only for myself, without being able to explain to anyone else how it all hangs together. I wish I could live for a long time so that one day I may know how to explain it, and if I am not granted that wish, well, then somebody else will perhaps do it, carry on from where my life has been cut short. And that is why I must try to live a good and faithful life to my last breath: so that those who come after me do not have to start all over again, need not face the same difficulties. Isn’t that doing something for future generations?” From Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943; and Letters from Westerbork (Picador, 1996).

You’re right, there is no end to clues. I can keep adding to this text forever. But if I want this story of interconnected writers and their ghost books to return to me again and again like a refrain, I must leave the absent present like you did. The incompletion of The Unwritten Book is its triumph. It’s also a promise that you will keep writing, and I’m looking forward to whatever comes next in whatever shape it takes. You’re no longer a ghost on my radar. 

All my best from Bracciano, 

Claire Polders

P.S. I wrote most of this letter on Halloween, though not deliberately. It just happened that way.