Dear Jonathan Franzen,

We met this week at your reading with Donald Antrim at the 92nd Street Y.  Of course, you may not remember our meeting, since I was in a line of several dozen people whose books you signed.  Be that as it may, I was very excited to finally meet you.

I admit to having a literary crush on you for several years.  After reading The Corrections, I (flattering myself) decided that you and I have a lot in common, and were destined to be together.  I could tell that we see things the same way.  I admired your expansive style of writing, your wit and intellect.  I also assumed that you were about 5-10 years older than me.

The age assumption turned out to be wrong.  I confess to sitting through a reading of yours last year (you read your essay on birding from How To Be Alone), mostly doing mental calculations of your age and trying to determine if my affections for you were entirely age innapropriate, and if so to what degree.  I confess to doing much the same thing during your reading this week at the Y. 

I had planned to say something clever when we met after the reading to make you see our cosmic connection, which is so clear to me.  I planned to mention some passage from Strong Motion that I found particularly memorable, or ask some insightful question that you wouldn’t have time to answer with all those other people waiting in line, and you would be so intrigued and want so much to continue our conversation that you would have to call me later and we would go for a drink to finish our chat.  Unfortunately, the clever line I chose to get your attention was, “I’m a big fan.”  Do you remember the scene in Dirty Dancing when Baby says, “I carried a watermelon,” and then stands on the pathway by herself and repeats, “I carried a watermelon?”?  It was pretty much like that.

Perhaps that is all for the best, since I have finished reading your memoir and have learned several important things.  First, you are just as smart and funny as I always thought.  My crush on you is as intense as ever, especially after learning all about your Midwestern boyhood.  I imagine we could spend most of our first date talking about growing up in Missouri and moving to New York.  But I also realized that my suspicions about our age difference were true:  that you are in fact 22 years my senior.  And that I, as a 24 year old, am dangerously close to actually being A Woman Half Your Age.  Which doesn’t bother me, really, but I can imagine it would make things difficult for us while attending dinner parties with your 40-something friends who would not be able to resist passing judgment.

But the crushing blow that your book dealt to my crush is the fact that you are, in fact, not single.  After some pretty serious googling, I discovered not only your girlfriend’s identity, but an article she wrote about your relationship as two writers of varying degrees of success.  It saddens me to say that the article was charming and insightful, making it difficult for me to write off your real-life relationship as I had hoped to do.    She writes humorous self-effacing sentences like, “It’s tempting to take comfort in generalizations, and I have,” and astute observations like, “What she envies is not something about being a writer, but something about being a man.”  It pains me to say it, but your girlfriend seems pretty great.

So, I suppose I am glad that you are in a relationship with such a smart and funny woman.  However, I am more than a little embarrassed at my failure to put my longstanding plan in to action.  If you do wind up breaking up, please publish an essay about it to let me know, and I’ll see you at your next reading.

Yours truly,

phonelesscord