These Are Love(D) Letters

by Ames Hawkins

Ames Hawkins's These are Love(d) Letters is a genre-bending visual memoir and work of literary nonfiction that explores the What inspires a person to write a love letter? What inspires a person to save a love letter even when the love has shifted or left? And what does it mean when a person uses someone else's love letters as a place from which to create their own sense of self?

Beginning with the "simple act" of the author receiving twenty letters written by her father to her mother over a six-week period in 1966, These are Love(d) Letters provides a complex pictorial and textual exploration of the work of the love letter. Through intimate and incisive prose―the letters were, after all, always intended to be a private dialogue between her parents―Hawkins weaves her own struggles with gender, sexuality, and artistic awakening in relation to the story of her parents' marriage that ended in divorce. Her father's HIV diagnosis and death by complications related to AIDS provide the context for an unflinchingly honest look at bodily disease and mortality. Hawkins delicately and relentlessly explores the tensions in a father-daughter relationship that stem from a differently situated connection to queer identity and a shared struggle with artistic desire. In communion with queer and lesbian writers from Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf to Alison Bechdel and Maggie Nelson, Hawkins pushes exploration of the self with the same intellectual rigor that she critiques the limits of epistolarity by continually relocating all the generative and arresting creative powers of this found art with scholarly rhetorical strategies.

Exquisitely designed by Jessica Jacobs, These are Love(d) Letters presents an affective experience that reinforces Hawkins's meditations on the ephemeral beauty of love letters. As poetic as it is visually enticing, the book offers both an unconventional and queer(ed) understanding of the documentarian form, which will excite both readers and artists across and beyond genres.

Genres: Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published September 9, 2019

Reviews

[Maia · Rating 3 out of 5]

A literary exploration which mixes nonfiction and memoir surrounding the theme of love letters. The author's parents met, fell in love, and then courted through a series of letters all in one whirlwind summer of 1966. Years later- after her parents divorced, after her father came out as gay, and contracted HIV- the author's mother passed on the series of 20 letters from 1966. The author, who also grew up to be queer and an artist, weaves in memories, quotes, and research to build a story of a relationship beginning and ending, of her father's illness and eventual death, and his creative and destructive impulses. Many other famous love letters are discussed including those written by Emily Dickenson, Radclyffe Hall, Janet Flanner, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. The book itself is full of collage elements and interesting use of handwriting and ephemera in the design. It made me want to re-read Nigel Nicholson's Portrait of a Marriage, another book written by the child of queer artists (Vita Sackville-West's son) and also catch up on my correspondence.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

In These Are Love(d) Letters, Ames Hawkins explores a cache of twenty letters sent from her father to her mother, and, on a wider plain, the art of letter writing. At first, I felt that the book jumped around a little, from philosophy and more foundational context, to personal experience. However, I got used to this after a while, and came to enjoy and admire the approach. There is a clear narrative strand throughout, and the prose is measured and often quite beautiful. Hawkins weaves in so many fascinating ideas to her intelligent and well-researched memoir of sorts.

[Kyle D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an experience. Multi-genre, beautiful, evocative. Exactly the book I want to write one day. I close it feeling honored to be invited to the experience.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is beautifully done. The layout is amazing, the reverence for subject matter is apparent. However the author tries to layer in a lot of extra subject matter and philosophy in without giving the reader a view of their own life. You never get to see the full letters (which I wouldn't want too anyway) but without having been to an event where Ames spoke about the book, I feel I would have been lost. It's a very personal memoir and there are hard truths revealed but sometimes it feels like the author is deliberately leaving you in the dark.

[Patricia Fancher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the kind of academic book I'd love to write one day. Equal parts theory, personal and archival. It opens up the challenges of the archive and history as deeply personal

[Anicca Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

So phenomenal. Anyone who is an artist, a writer, like memoir, thinks about family lineages, likes multi-genre or "transgenre" as the author call it, should get this and read it immediately.