DEAR ANN

Mason’s first novel since The Girl in the Blue Beret (2011) is a deeply moving meditation on one woman’s life choices and the road she didn’t take.

Onboard a cruise ship in 2017, a troubled Ann Workman ponders her past. What if she had heeded her old college professor Albert’s advice and gone to Stanford for graduate school instead of heading to Harpur College in upstate New York? It was the 1960s, and California was “at the center of the universe," as Albert enthused in a letter, one of many that Ann has saved over 50 years and that populate the narrative. How would Ann’s life have changed? Fusing her memories with a writer's imagination, she creates a new storyline in which a naïve young woman drives west "with an innocent boldness" to Palo Alto. Exploring this new world that is “both tantalizing and threatening,” Ann gradually comes out of her shell, especially after she meets Jimmy, the “Real Thing” she has longed for. He too is an outsider, ashamed of his suburban Chicago background and intrigued by her rural Kentucky roots. Bonding over literature and music, they embark on an intense relationship against the backdrop of a Stanford campus “quivering with spontaneous demonstrations and teach-ins” against the escalating Vietnam War. Through this poignant romance, Mason vividly evokes the exhilaration and excitement of being young during such tumultuous cultural and political changes. It's no wonder that years later Chip, a friend of Jimmy and Ann, refers to that era as "the best time of my life, and of course the saddest." As Ann reassesses her choices, the reader senses that the 80-year-old author is using this haunting novel to also take stock of her own life.

A beautifully written homage to the 1960s by a mature writer at the top of her literary power.