Stunning, unintended portrait of celeb’s life
Mary-Louise Parker offers a rich and detailed view on modern masculinity
When an actress announces that she’s writing a book — especially an ambitious, literary one — it’s not always a good thing. Celebrity tends to bestow book deals on the undeserving. And so readers will be forgiven for regarding Mary-Louise Parker’s debut Dear Mr. You with skepticism.
But they will be wrong. Gloriously wrong.
This memoirish collection of letters is, as it turns out, actually quite stunning. The book trains Parker’s thoughtful eye on the men (both real and hypothetical) who have shaped who she is, from her childhood priest to her father, doctors to cab drivers, close friends to lovers, her son to the uncle of her adopted Ethiopian daughter.
The premise is unique and it works. At times poetic, at times deeply funny, these missives strike the right balance between sentiment and fact, storytelling and musing.
Moreover, what emerges from the portraits is a rich, nuanced view on masculinity. A view that celebrates stereotypes just as it upends them. A view with much tenderness attached.
But the book accomplishes something else remarkable, almost as an afterthought. These vignettes are revealing; they tell us as much about the award-winning actress as they do about the men who surround her, champion her, rescue her, haunt her and (only very occasionally) mistreat her.
And here’s the thing: Parker is a modern woman, part of a new tribe whose narratives have radically departed from the traditional. She had a baby by herself in her forties (actor Billy Crudup reportedly left her while she was pregnant) and then she adopted a second child.
Love drifts in and out of her life, but she is without a partner, a single mother, supporting her family-of-three by her own wits and will.
In current times, we are surrounded by such women, but they remain, in their newness, mysterious. We don’t know their stories, or understand their life patterns.
But with Dear Mr. You, Parker normalizes this trajectory and gives a window into some of its distinctive delights: “Monet days” with her children, filling the bathtub with cheap flowers and painting them; a fashion designer-turned-pal turning up at the hospital when she falls ill and offering to be the emergency contact; a best friend’s husband taking her calls during a dark time. Though Parker is living solo, she is far from alone.
And in the end, it’s this — this unintended portrait of Parker’s own life — that proves to be the book’s most lasting impression. Tara Henley is a writer and editor.