Dear DeeDee

by Kat Meads

West Coast-based Aunt K (the author) writes to niece DeeDee, ostensibly to bring her up to speed on family history and share anecdotes about their North Carolina relatives, past and present. The letters soon evolve into broader discussions of community, loss, love, ambition, leaving the South (in body, if not mind) and what it means to negotiate life as a female. Integral to the correspondence are books and writers (from Burroughs to Woolf), landscapes and cityscapes in North Carolina, California, New Mexico, New York, East Sussex and elsewhere. A persistent the inter-weavings of person and place. In the tradition of Jane Austen's letters to niece Fanny Knight and Fay Weldon's Letters to Alice, DeeDee is a female's interpretation of the world. It is also, in the sum of its parts, deeply concerned with the question of which elements (genetic and circumstantial) conspire to make us who we are.

176 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 4, 2020

Reviews

[L.A. Heberlein]

If you’re unacquainted with the fiction of Kat Meads, don’t start with this book. Read 1) “For You, Madame Lenin,” the engrossing story of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Russian revolutionary most remembered now for having married a more famous Russian revolutionary; 2) “Sleep,” a science-fictionish tale set in Silicon Valley, in which drone-like automatons who staff the tech firms, sleeplessly, are rescued by bands of rebels whose philosophy treats sleep as a sacrament; 3) “The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan,” in which a first-person narrator examines her own life in the shadow of the more extreme behavior of a wild woman; 4) “Senestre on Vacation,” a tone poem masquerading as noire detective novel, published under a pseudonym.

After you’ve read those, you’ll probably want to read all the Kat Meads there is. There are short stories, memoir, poetry, other novels, and most recently this light, engaging epistolary only-barely-fictional memoir.

[Denise Tolan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a love song to childhood, to a brother, to a former almost sister, to memories. Dear DeeDee is more than a memoir. It is a distillation of feelings, a time capsule of collected dreams, an invitation for us all to share in the building of a quilt. Kat Meads holds your hand as she leads you through this book. It is a walk you will be forever changed by.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a marvelously inventive memoir in epistolary form, with the author's account of her childhood and subsequent life addressed to a fictional niece. The form adds a layer of meaning to this wise, witty, and deeply moving book. Very highly recommended. This Kat Meads at her best.