Dear Michael,

I hope you can forgive me for appropriating the epistolary form to write this review, but I wanted to tell you just how impressed I was by Dear Everybody. You have created something that I found very affecting, warm in places, tinged with affection – but my abiding sensation after finishing is one of sorrow.

I mourn not just for Jonathon Bender, whose tragic life is encapsulated within this collection of letters, written immediately before he takes his own life. Although he is the centre of this tragedy, and worthy of our grief, I also feel sorrow for his mother, whose diaries reveal the anguish of an abused wife; sorrow for his younger brother Robert, who through his commentary on the letters and his conversations with their father, earns our scorn for his inability to understand his brother even in death. Robert deserves our pity also, despite his apparent lack of empathy, because the influence of his father is all too clear in his attitudes, and in his own way his life has been just as badly affected by the nature of their childhood.

That’s not to say you’ve sent us on a total downer with this book – Jonathon’s choice of recipients for his letters as he looks back over his life includes some deeply unorthodox selections, and his gentle demeanour in the face of mental illness and domestic violence is in many ways deeply encouraging. Whether writing to his mother, his father, his ex-wife, a weather satellite, the state of Michigan or anyone else who has had an impact on his life, his perspective, viewing even his adult life with an almost childlike simplicity, can be wry and funny and sweet. I like how he is apparently unable to lie on his CV, though we never find out whether he sent it or not:

Many short-term jobs with duties that included typing, filing, making long-distance phone calls to ex-girlfriends, looking out the window, and stealing office supplies.

Your portrayal of his mental illness is not overblown, and has, for me, the ring of authenticity. Your hints at darker secrets in Jonathon’s life, crimes perpetrated by his father perhaps, deepen the tragedy. If there is a suggestion of redemption anywhere in this story, it is in the hope that Robert, deeply unsympathetic and self-centred though he appears, has, through the letters of his brother and the journey they have taken him on, arrived at a new way to address his relationship with his father and his whole childhood. His lack of commentary towards the end of the book, where extracts from Jonathon’s ex-wife’s eulogy take over, lead me to hope that his final muteness indicates some kind of epiphany has occurred. I would certainly like to think that that’s the case.

Thank you, Jonathon, for taking the trouble to write to everyone before you left a world in which you never felt truly at home. Thank you, Michael, for this wonderful book.

Yours sincerely,

Simon Appleby

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