With her permission, I am sharing a letter I received from a recent reader of THE OTHER BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE. It’s from one of the most thoughtful, inspiring people I know… Linsey Abrams, retired professor, the former head of the MFA department at the City College of New York, my former thesis advisor at CCNY, where I received an MFA in Fiction, a mentor to so many, including me, a gorgeous writer…

Dear Caroline,

It’s a beautiful novel. So full, the way life is. The present story and all the different pasts swirl like a galaxy, an organizing principle of an otherwise diffuse mass. The self.

It is tough and sweet, funny and profound, wrenching, alarming, thrilling, and always on the verge of something more complicated or simple. The films are a revelation.

Parents propel our destinies (they’re the one thing we can’t recover from, and the one thing that, conversely, makes us truly us—this is such a feelingful story). And then the struggle to accept a “home” (most people try to find it) becomes more and more central until everything converges to land her exactly there. My favorite character is Jack.

This is, of course, a woman’s Hamlet. Ghost, being haunted, brainy, language obsessed, mother father, her inability to live with things as they are. The horrible imperfection and then devolution. Who can live with what happens?

Women readers recognize themselves in Amy. What a multifaceted internal life—it rings true. It rings. And she is particularly herself…at the same time a bit like the narrated others. What she sees in them is hers. She’s like the firemen too. Unlike Hamlet, her eroticism runs all the way through it. This also rings.

You should be exhilarated, which I suspect you are.

Love, Linsey