December 31, 2023

Since I began to write these letters in September 2019, my time has been swallowed up almost entirely by trying first to make sense of the news every day and then to write coherently about how that news fits into U.S. history. When we added writing a book on top of that, it meant that most other things got ignored. 

One of the things that got left behind was making any effort to keep copies of the letters. I wrote them every night and then let them float away, vaguely hoping that someday, if we needed to, we could recreate the record from the various places they washed up.

And then, early in the month, this arrived.

David Link of Richland, Washington, has been collecting the letters since the beginning, and he got together with graphic designer Dani Smart and fine artist Rochelle Walden—all part of this community—to produce a copy of the full run of Letters from an American for my shelves. The volumes with the black labels are the letters with notes; the red volumes are the letters without them.

The set with the notes is twelve volumes, and David tells me another one is already in press. 

I am blown away, both by how much of my life is contained in these volumes and by the community we have built as you have asked questions, corrected errors, made friendships, and cheered this project on for more than four years. If these volumes contain four years of my life, they also contain four years of the life of this community and this nation.

I’m beyond grateful to all of you for helping to create such a vital body of work, and to David, Dani, Rochelle for collecting it into such a beautiful set of volumes.

It’s quite a record, and I expect that over the course of the next twelve months, that record will become even more important. 

Happy New Year, everyone. Let’s do this!