Dear Papa,

Dear Papa,

Truly, I wish I could have known you. 

You were named as the most influential writer of your time. They even say that you were the greatest writer of the entire twentieth century. Would you agree to that? Your friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wildly jealous of your success, and it seemed to even tear the two of you apart. But the pressure mounted. Writing became not something you enjoyed, something you had a passion for, but a job. It was no longer what it had been when you were a young man in your twenties and thirties.

Who are 'they' anyways? Whoever they are, who are 'they' to say you had to take up that burden? It's strange, isn't it; usually it's after someone has died that critics and the public and anyone important proclaims a work to be ingenious, a must read, or a complete classic. 

My friend told me when I started reading this memoir that you are (were?) a terrible person. "He was just a womanizing drunk!" she shouted in explaining her hatred. "I have no respect for the man. Never have. Never will." 

But you see, your friend is proving otherwise. 

A.E. Hotchner. Someone you only met because of an assignment he thought was doomed to failure from the start, an article full of questions you'd never answer. Or so he thought. But he thought wrong, because you answered those questions, that humble note left on your front door in your Cuba house, your little finca. He spins a tale for us about a man with a presence greater than any other, a legend in the flesh, someone who didn't hardly seem human upon meeting him.

I sympathize with Hotchner, who, forty, maybe almost fifty years after you pulled the trigger, traveled his way to your finca and reminisced on the old times, the fourteen year friendship you two shared, and how he still feels like dropping you a line and writing you letters. I do the same, though people think I'm strange. When I address a letter to a dead relative, one I never even got to meet, I simply say it's to a friend. 

I want to travel, more than anything in the world. I don't have the money nor the means to do so for now, but I'm getting there. You clearly did your fair share of voyaging around the world, as Hotchner tells me with how the memoir is pieced together. Til I get rich on my own writing, I'll be living vicariously through you and your travels. I know that neither your, nor Hotchner, will disappoint. 

Until next,

-Catherine Andersen

18 January 2012