It is possible you are anxious about my death. Perhaps you wonder if I killed myself after I wrote my last book because I had no more books from the future to copy. Did I copy them, line for line, over the years, spacing the publications for maximum commercial impact? Beginning with that first one, which I received in the Da Nang province in 1966, shortly before I received notice of my mother’s death? Did I come home and discover twelve more novels in a cardboard suitcase in the front closet? Did I study their titles and covers with a dry mouth and my heart beating tremulously and then burn them in my fireplace without reading them? Does it matter? I had my life. The books have theirs. But when I put a pistol in my mouth, a few days or a few hours from now—I’m still making up my mind about it—it will not be because I ran out of things to write. It will be because I miss my mother, and because I broke my back in a motorcycle accident in 1975 and the pain is rotten, and because I shot an unarmed woman in the throat in Vietnam and have never forgiven myself for it. She was hiding under a blanket in a dark room, and when I poked the blanket, she rose, screaming, and I killed her. Upon seeing the body, my sergeant put a grenade in her hand and said he’d file papers to see I got a medal. I have been a war hero ever since. That is why I did not write to my mother for three months: not the clap, as I have said elsewhere. This is why I wrote fiction for thirty years: because I could not bear the truth.

Or at least I could not bear most of the truth. Once my mother was dying and a man was kind to her. That is a truth that has kept me going well past my time.

I have the gun, and I have tested the feel of the barrel in my mouth, but I haven’t pulled the trigger yet. I go for a walk every day. Sometimes I walk down to the park, where the Bookmobile stops on Thursday mornings. A little part of me is hanging on to see if we may yet have a word with each other. Also, I would like to know what Philip Roth is going to publish after my death. Isn’t that what keeps so many of us hanging on past our Return-By date? We can’t help wishing for one more lovely story.

I hope you are well. I wish you a lifetime of happy reading, free from guilt. See you around sometime?

Best,

Brad Dolan