My Review of Michael Kimball’s Dear Everybody

I took a different approach with my review of Michael Kimball’s Dear Everybody. An excerpt:

What struck me about Jonathon Bender’s letters is their consistency. No matter how painful the subject, his letters remain bright, honest, winsome, and often childlike. So many people seek to find their “inner child” but for Bender that child never left, never grew up. But I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, at least not entirely. While his naïveté may keep him from being able to piece himself together, and keep himself together, it does allow him to see things with such stunning clarity and to say what has gone unsaid for so long. For instance, in his first letter, he writes:

Dear Mom and Dad,
Do you ever wish that the sperm and the egg that became me wasn’t me? I’m sure that you must have been expecting someone else from all of that pleasure.