You Should Read DEAR EDNA SLOANE by Amy Shearn
Reading Notes
As one character in Dear Edna Sloane writes to her elderly father, “There’s a thing now called Content Warnings” (221). In that spirit, here’s a content warning for this book.
If you’re an aspiring author with a list of rejections longer than your to-be-read pile;
If you’re in recovery from creative writing workshops;
If you worked / are working / want to work in the publishing industry;
If you feel forgotten or overlooked as an artist (or a person);
If you question the restrictions capitalism places on creativity;
Then Dear Edna Sloane might sting like vinegar in a papercut. This book may not be for you.
Actually, no. Scratch that: Amy Shearn’s novel is for you. And if you want to laugh out loud, it’s definitely for you.
And you and you and you.
Seth Edwards is an Associate Editor at Long Story, a website dedicated to covering the literary world. Despite his promising job title, Seth is a mere content creator. The novel opens with an instant message to Seth from his boss: “Listen. I have something to tell you” (9).
Her message introduces the motif of rumors that permeates the book. Shearn’s unconventional epistolary format allows her to chase gossip across the internet. She tells the story not only through instant messages, text messages, and emails but also through forums and threads posted on cleverly named social media sites, like readit.com, Facefriends, and ImmediaPix. Seth’s boss reports that Edna Sloane, the one-hit-wonder author of the 1980s classic An Infinity of Traces, is not dead or disappeared, as the literary world has long presumed, but “is alive and well and living in New York”—according to a friend, that is (9).
Acquiring an interview with Edna Sloane would electrify Seth’s career. In an attempt to find her, composes emails to anyone who might know Sloane: her literary agent, her bitter ex-husband, the wife of her deceased editor, even his own former classmate who wrote a paper about An Infinity of Traces that one time. Seth’s early inquiries are generic and self-important. (They are also hilariously cringy.) In one he briefly hopes someone can “lend a clue” to Sloane’s whereabouts before he introduces himself as “a bit of a writer . . . currently shopping around an experimental short story collection” (11). With each missive, Seth’s obsession grows, and his focus soon shifts away from himself and toward Sloane’s impact as a writer. In an email to a lowly employee at Sloane’s publisher, Seth asks, “What I want to know is: how could you (not you you, but you know what I mean) let a writer like Edna Sloane disappear?” (21)
This idea that the publishing world somehow controls authors reflects Seth’s post-MFA disillusionment. In grad school Seth “thought [he] had gotten somewhere . . . [and] cracked a code” (46). His ambition was limitless—and so too, he thought, were his opportunities. New York City, once he arrived, had other thoughts.
When he (mild spoiler) in fact finds and begins corresponding with Edna Sloane, his ideas about the creative life expand. At the Long Story office, he giddily circulates a shared Google doc titled “WHY BOOKS STILL MATTER: A list for Edna Sloane” (99). He is the sole contributor. Writing to Edna encourages him to face his insecurities and defend his passions. He shares:
“I’ve accidentally started writing about why people write, not why people read. That answer is maybe even easier. The world is not enough. How can it be? Regular life—working for a paycheck, commuting without killing anyone, boiling the pasta, going to Target because you’ve convinced yourself a new plastic bin to organize your papers will solve something, everything. It’s not enough. I want to live a million lives. I want to travel across the universe, in and out of every brain. So I read books, which is as close as I can get. I don’t know, does that do anything for you?” (105).
Edna Sloane, for all her talent and experience, does not have all the answers. In a letter to her son, she confesses, “Did you know, my pet, that my life’s work has indeed been about how a person can really know herself? About how every historical process, everything that has happened, leaves a trace in every person?” (172-3).
Today in my class I taught students about themes, which are not, as pop culture might have you believe, single words, topics, or decor ideas. A theme is an author’s message about an abstract feeling, emotion, or value. It’s an insight into the human experience that both applies to a text and extends beyond it. It’s an observation about what it means to be a person. It’s a hypothesis about the meaning of life. According to Shearn’s novel, the answer can be found in literature.
Why read? Why write? Because literature, as one reviewer describes Sloane’s novel, is “a celebration of life in all its forms, despite its setting in the belly of death itself” (242). Although Sloane’s novel takes place in a specifically terrible “setting,” the human condition itself is a setting. When you think of it, what is life but facing “the belly of death” that is mortality and hoping, loving, creating, questioning, improving, growing anyway?
In a week full of rejection at my house, Dear Edna Sloane provided just the reminder and laughter I needed. I hope it offers the same to you.
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: 2024
Timeline: about 2 years
Setting: New York City
Narrator: primarily 1st POV, alternating between Seth & Edna; epistolary structure
Length: 242 pages
Book Club
Early on Seth emails a former grad school classmate, Zed Patel, who is “living that sweet campus life” as a university professor (37). Seth pointedly ends his email with this sarcastic line: “And just know I am not at all jealous that Knopf is publishing your novel, nope not at all, no big deal” (39). How does Seth’s interaction with Edna Sloane alter his perspective? How does his understanding of success change?
In her second letter to Seth, Edna discusses the sensation of being pulled apart by her many selves. She is a writer and an old woman, a neighbor and a mother. Which is most authentic? She writes, “For your generation I imagine it is fragmented even further—who are you, Seth Edwards? The Facefriend profile? The ImmediaPix feed? Right? Or am I off-base” (121). To what extent do you agree with Edna that younger people are more fragmented today? In what ways do you feel fragmented? Do you find the internet to be the main culprit, as Edna argues, or do you think other factors contribute to this sense?
Close Reading
Creative Writing
Fiction: In Dear Edna Sloane, Seth and Edna have very little in common on the surface apart from living in New York City. She is a divorced mother to an adult son. He is a single adult son. She is a well-respected novelist. He is a cog in the clickbait-seeking machine. Yet they connect over a shared passion. Start with two opposite characters. Give them concrete roles or jobs that seem contradictory. A rapper and a cellist. A senator and an anarchist. A Michelin-starred chef and a McDonald’s CEO. Once you establish their differences, decide on an intangible idea or emotion that will tie them together. A shared love of snowmobiling? A hatred for soggy cereal? Get weird! See what happens when you make the two characters bump into each other at a grocery store.
Nonfiction: Text messages strip all the context from conversations, so put it back in! Find a text exchange in your phone and rewrite it as an embodied scene. What’s going on around you while you read and respond to the messages? What do you hear and smell in the background? What are you wearing? How are you feeling?
Sentence Study
“To them, Seth is a continuum—the baby who was born, as family legend has it, nearly blue from the cord wrapped around his neck and check, beauty-queen-sash-style; Seth is the toddler who loves fire trucks and hates cheese and is afraid of dogs but loves horses; Seth is the weird kid who steals his own lost teeth from under his own pillow because the doesn’t want the tooth fairy taking them; Seth is the fifth grader who gets beat up by bullies but then turns it around by selling those same bullies ‘homework help slips’; Seth is the gangly teenager going to prom with a group of punks who only go ironically, and playing in a truly terrible band that only plays covers of songs they all hate, and failing English even though it’s his best subject because he takes an oddly principled stand against standardized tests.”
The longest sentence in a book isn’t necessarily the worthiest sentence, but I love this one. First, it’s an excellent example of a lesser-used function of the semicolon. Most often, semicolons separate independent clauses. Here, though, they are used to separate items in a complex list, which allows Shearn to wallow in the Seth-ness of all of Seth’s phases. If she’d written each “Seth is…” as a separate sentence, it would have disrupted the flow of the syntactical continuum she creates. The sentence, like Seth, is a continuum.
Another noteworthy aspect of this sentence is its simple, straightforward beginning: “To them, Seth is a continuum.” The dash following this clause visually separates the various Seths from his family’s perception of them. To me, the dash also indicates some emotional distance between Seth and his family. They see him as living through one haphazardly entertaining phase after the next rather than as pursuing his particular dream.
