Writing Fan Letters

On the underrated pleasure of telling people you admire their work.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about two of my favorite YouTube music explainers. One was Dan Barracuda, a guitarist who somehow makes complicated songs seem both understandable and even more impressive. The other was Daniel Attanasio, a pianist who does much the same thing for classical music from behind a keyboard.

After publishing the piece, I sent each of them a brief note. I thought they might be amused to learn that they had appeared in the newsletter of an infectious diseases doctor, which is not necessarily the audience either of them had in mind when they started making music videos.

Both wrote back with warm and appreciative responses.

This reminded me of something I’ve believed for a long time: If someone creates something you enjoy, you should tell them. Just a note saying: I liked this. It meant something to me. Thank you for making it.

I’ve been sending versions of these notes for most of my life. Here are a few of the memorable ones.

#1: Matt Christopher

When I was in grade school, roughly age 10, I couldn’t get enough of the books of Matt Christopher. These were short inspirational novels about kids who played sports, and I devoured them.

Once, after taking out yet another one from the library, I told my mother that I wished I could tell him how much I enjoyed his books — especially Catcher with a Glass Arm, which I recall as particularly compelling, and Baseball Flyhawk, the inspirational story of an outsider who earns the trust of his team.

“Write him a letter,” she said. “I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.”

This had somehow not occurred to me. Authors were distant and mysterious people whose names appeared on book covers. They didn’t seem like people who could receive mail from just some kid.

But I wrote to him, and my mother was right. Matt Christopher was only too happy to hear from a 10-year-old boy who loved his books. That’s about all I remember of his response — that he thanked me for sending the letter.

I wish I still had both the note I sent and the one he sent back. Unfortunately, my mother threw them away one summer while I was at camp, taking advantage of my absence to “clean up” my room.

Not that I necessarily would have saved them myself. Still, reading them today would be fun.

She later did the same thing with my baseball card collection, but that’s a different story.

#2: Robert Penn Warren

I read All the King’s Men in high school and was simply blown away. The sweep of its characters, its richly drawn world of the American South, and especially the ambiguity of the main character Willie Stark — both demigod and tyrant — took me somewhere I’d never been before. It was thrilling.

A few years later, I was tasked to invite a distinguished author to be the keynote speaker at my college’s literary society. Would Robert Penn Warren agree to do this? I wrote him a glowing fan letter, telling him how much his book meant to me, and then finishing with the invitation.

Alas, he couldn’t make it — but I do remember his response, which in my memory went a lot like this:

Dearest Paul:
There are many fine things in the world, and two of them are Boston in the spring, and even more, the very kind letter you wrote about my book. Unfortunately, I can’t join you for your event, but at least I have your generous praise of All the King’s Men, which I will cherish. It is notes from people like you which make the sometimes lonely life of a writer feel bearable.
With appreciation,
Robert Penn Warren

I’d give you the exact words, but this time the faulty archivist is me — I have no idea where his response letter is. But what I wrote was pretty close.

#3: Anne Fadiman

She may be best-known for The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, but the Anne Fadiman book that really got me was The Wine Lover’s Daughter. In it, she describes the experience of growing up with her father, Clifton Fadiman, who was a famous post-war “intellectual”. All but forgotten today, he had established celebrity just for being smart — editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, founder of the Book of the Month Club, and radio and TV game show host for brainiacs.

Here’s how one reviewer described him:

He was something of an encyclopedia himself, his mind a magpie’s nest of odd facts and glittering insights that he summoned with seeming ease as a great explainer of literature and culture to popular audiences.

In our era of video influencers and short attention spans, it’s all but impossible to imagine such a celebrity today.

Back to his daughter’s book. No doubt the reason it especially appealed to me was because Clifton Fadiman embodied many of my father’s best traits — his broad learning, his enthusiasms, his eastern European family roots, his love of fine French Bordeaux wine. This was my father!

So here’s the note I sent her:

On the advice of a friend/colleague, I’ve just read The Wine Lover’s Daughter and Ex Libris, and enjoyed them both thoroughly. My father (born in 1931, so a generation younger than yours) was also a wine collector and a passionate accumulator of facts, so much of the former book resonated strongly, as did the general love of books and words espoused in Ex Libris.

This friend says she wishes she could write just one sentence as perfectly crafted as those we read frequently in your prose. It’s a good aspiration, one I share. We’ll keep trying!

Thank you for writing these great books.

I never heard back. Perhaps I had the wrong email address, or one that she never checked. Or maybe women are less likely to respond to email than men, afraid of being stalked.

Still glad I sent it.

#4: Laura Waters

Not all fan letters are about books, of course. And not all are letters: the low friction of email allows us to send them more easily, though one could argue they possibly have less of an impact in this digital form.

But here’s what happened with Dr. Laura Waters, an HIV specialist from England. I knew her name, and had seen her give a few brief talks, but never had the opportunity to see her star on the podium until 2019. She was given a truly challenging task, which was to present one of the final lectures at the most important scientific conference in HIV medicine, CROI.

No one wants to give the last lecture. Many attendees of the meeting have already departed. Work and family life have crept back into our collective consciousness, and we worry about flight delays, overflowing to-do lists, and resumption of real life.

But in 2019, I stayed to the very end and heard Laura give a talk on a controversial topic in our field. It was, frankly, brilliant. She knew the subject inside and out, but just as important, she knew exactly how to present it — with enough complexity to be substantive, but never so much that the audience had to struggle to keep up.

How can you tell when you’re in the presence of such a master? The presenter doesn’t read the slides. They cover the important points without burying them in unnecessary detail. They make asides that are relevant, entertaining, and actually helpful. And, in Laura’s case, they’re funny. Laura is truly funny.

After the talk, I sent this brief note you see at the top of this section. Shortly after, I received an appreciative (and funny!) response.

And because of the miracle of the internet, her talk can be viewed in its entirety here.

#5: Joe Posnanski

Back to baseball we go, this time not just to my favorite baseball writer, but one of my favorite writers full stop, as the British say.

If you don’t know Joe Posnanski, he can write beautifully about almost any sport, but mostly baseball in all it’s strange and wonderful detail — Hall of Fame debates, Derek Jeter getting old and slow, how the game you love at age 10 is the game you yearn for the rest of your life despite everything about it changing.

But he can also write about anything — bad movie titles, stupid television commercials, writer’s block (or in his case, never having writer’s block), and most appealingly, his two daughters. Just try reading this “Katie the Prefect” essay without smiling, without several times nodding in recognition, without perhaps getting a bit teary-eyed at the end. And I write that as one of the rare individuals who doesn’t care much for Harry Potter. Doesn’t matter — that essay is simply sensational.

During the pandemic, when lunch at the hospital meant sitting alone in my office because we weren’t allowed to gather in groups, I developed a small daily ritual. I’d queue up something Joe had written and let it take me away from all the Covid misery for fifteen minutes. This went on for months — through The Baseball 100, through his piece on Djokovic’s bizarre U.S. Open exit, and through all sorts of wonderful digressions that only he could make feel essential.

So I wrote him a fan letter, which I’m sharing below. In it, I not only praised his writing, but also pointed out some important common ground: baseball, tennis, and a Cleveland connection through my wife’s family. I even invited him to play tennis if he’s ever in Boston.

I signed my name and, though I wanted it to be a real letter, it was such a crazy time that off it went electronically to his agent as an attachment. After a few months of hearing nothing, I mailed it in an actual envelope, and eventually got this:

Hi Paul,
So, I apologize for it taking me SO long to get back to you and your wonderful letter. I have no excuse, I can’t imagine that I have been busier than you have been these last weeks. I was thrilled by your letter as was my wife and I cannot thank you enough for it.
I cannot believe your wife’s family owned the Al Paul, which was, I believe, 231 10-year-old steps away from the front door of our tiny house on Warrendale Road. I used to pass the Al Paul literally every single day on my way to Cedar Center, which was the center of our existence. I have to believe your wife and I crossed paths and could have many conversations about the Lawson’s nearby, the Cedar Center bowling alley, the Cedar Center movie theater and the tiny public library on the corner where I basically learned to read.
Thanks again for writing. It really means a lot to me.
Joe

The wait was definitely worth it, as was leveraging the Al Paul Auto Wash! And that invitation to play tennis, needless to say, remains open.

Have you ever written a fan letter? If not, what are you waiting for?