Dear Mr. You

In this gutsy memoir, award-winning actress Mary-Louise Parker addresses all the men who have influenced her path in life. Parker is a talented writer, and Dear Mr. You is a strikingly intimate tribute to the resonance of human encounters, to personal and artistic development, to love and loss and perseverance. Recommended By Renee P., Powells.com

A wonderfully unconventional literary debut from the award-winning actress Mary-Louise Parker.

An extraordinary literary work, Dear Mr. You renders the singular arc of a woman's life through letters Mary-Louise Parker composes to the men, real and hypothetical, who have informed the person she is today. Beginning with the grandfather she never knew, the letters range from a missive to the beloved priest from her childhood to remembrances of former lovers to an homage to a firefighter she encountered to a heartfelt communication with the uncle of the infant daughter she adopted. Readers will be amazed by the depth and style of these letters, which reveal the complexity and power to be found in relationships both loving and fraught.

“Mary-Louise Parker's Dear Mr. You is straight-up fantastic; a gripping and deeply humane and often hilarious book. It catches glimpses of life at all sorts of unexpected moments, electrifying them with its sharp-eyed astonishment at how absurd and joyous things can get. There's nothing cheaply-earned about its wonder; nothing sugarcoated in its gratitude.Its all grit, all messy particulars—full of surprise and full-throated in its song.” Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

“To have an artist accomplished in one genre triumph in another—seemingly out of the blue—is an extraordinary event. Mary-Louise Parker's Dear Mr. You is a pants-pissingly funny, gut-wrenching meditation on her loving and tormented encounters with the masculine. From grandfather to father to son to the wacky, pre-Burning Man hippie with a loincloth who haunts her at a co-op job to the lover who deserves the coda ‘Sleep tight, little monster.' Whether honoring the ash-covered firefighter she sees on 9/11 or shouting as a crazy person at her malignantly lost cabdriver, Parker merges memoir with poetry in this haunting, sui generis work. I drank it down in one gulp, then started back at page one again. A magnificent, necessary surprise.” Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club and Lit

Mary-Louise Parker is an award-winning actress with a career spanning television, film, and theater. Winner of both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her role in Angels in America and a Tony Award winner for her performance in Proof, Parker is most well-known for her leading role in the prime-time series, Weeds, for which she also won a Golden Globe. Parker has also been featured in films such as Fried Green Tomatoes, Red, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and more. This is her first book.

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