A belated thank you from a longtime fan

Dear Mrs. Reynolds Naylor,

I hope this note finds you happy healthy and well! I’m a 27 year old resident of the DMV area and was randomly inspired to google one of my favorite book series growing up… Alice.

I have thought about and remembered many scenes from her stories in the past years, idly, as I’ve moved through my life learning lessons or even just shuffling through the mundane, washing dishes and suddenly recalling a scene where she cried at school or recalling my mother’s delight when I shared the laundry poem with her… missing my mom… being grateful I didn’t lose her when Alice lost hers.

As a child, your books gave me an escape and they gave me validation. At a time when all my books were about white people (because if they were about black people they were historical dramas or painstakingly inner-city “urban” [a child can only read of so many imagined lynchings and shootings]) Alice didn’t make me feel isolated. I didn’t read her books imagining that she looked like me instead (as I routinely did with others). She was just this wonderful transcendent character who I’m tearing up thinking about all these years later.

So I wanted to take this moment to write to you and tell you that you’re an inspiration, a magnificent storyteller and that I simply love your work.

Thank you for using your gifts in a way that has brightened so many lives with that spark of feeling understood, with laughter and joy and empathy and the sort of enlightenment that shines on the self… illuminating the beautiful maze of girlhood and the continuous becoming that is womanhood.

My Chopin-Liszt: (since I literally had to throw your books away along with all my other favorites, my diaries, my cards, and everything not plastic glass or metal when I was 17 due to contamination)

– the full Alice series, to reacquaint myself with an old friend, and for posterity. My little cousin is at the perfect age to read Alice books and she would have gotten them as hand-me-downs like I did, if that would have been possible. Instead she’ll have them as a new gift.

Thank you for the gift you’ve shared.

Thinking of you with gratitude,

Nevada

You’ve certainly made my day!  I’m just delighted that your little cousin is going to get to enjoy them too.  I never had a daughter, so perhaps Alice was the substitute for me, though I really identified with Alice myself, even though I was fortunate to have my mother through all my growing up years.  I cried as I was writing some of the scenes from the books, and on book tours, there were certain passages that I never read aloud because they always made me tear up.  But whenever I felt it was getting too heavy, writing a scene with Lester in it, or Aunt Sally, was something I enjoyed so much.  And it makes me happy to that readers enjoyed the books too.  Thank you for your letter.  It meant a lot.