Actress now a respected fiction writer
Print Edition
THE latest round of raves for Mary-Louise Parker is not for her acting, but for her writing.
Parker’s “Dear Mr. You,” a collection of lyrical and often emotional essays about men addressed to everyone from former (and unnamed) lovers to family members, NASA and a September 11 firefighter, has been highly praised by critics.
“Dear Mr. You” was originally submitted to publishers with her name withheld by literary agent Eric Simonoff, whose clients include Pulitzer Prize-winning writers.
“I was immediately intrigued by the prose,” said editor Colin Harrison of Scribner, which acquired the book. “It was startling, electric — it beckoned, it provoked, it zapped up the energy level of the reader.”
The 51-year-old Parker clearly favors talking about writing over the discussion of acting, or, especially, her personal life.
While a Golden Globe winner for the TV series “Weeds” and HBO film “Angels in America” and a Tony winner for “Proof,” she has for years been contributing essays to Esquire, The Riveter and other magazines.
In “Dear Mr. You,” Parker calls her late father, John Morgan Parker, the “wizard of all fathers” and remembers his advice to her soon before his death: “Just write, keep writing, promise that you will.”
Here are highlights from the interview.
On writing and privacy:
“I am apparently hard to read — not to people I know but I hear the same comments often through my life. I guess I feel I can’t ignore them — ‘What are you thinking?’ ‘Are you upset?’ — when I am not upset at all.
“When I do open up, I really open up and am very thorough about what I choose to reveal. It also seems very free to know I was the architect of it and I won’t be misrepresented. I can be as truthful as I want to be. I’m saying it in the way I choose to present it.”
On a near-death emergency and hospitalization, described in her essay “Dear Doctor”:
“It’s not that I saw God, necessarily, but I was in another space. I was not fully conscious. I was hallucinating. I was speaking gibberish. I was in shock, septic shock, and the question is, ‘Where do you go? Where does your consciousness go when that happens?’”
On the sense of gratitude in many of her essays:
“When you’re reading my book, I’m putting my thoughts in your head and why would I want to put in something negative? Not that there isn’t some immense pain.... But I didn’t want there to be an indictment of anyone, or try to elicit sympathy for me in any way. It’s a bunch of thank-you notes.
“That’s all there is — just a bunch of thank-you notes.”
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