Genre Bender: Susan Smith Nash's I Never Did Tell You Did I?

Is Susan Smith Nash’s I Never Did Tell You Did I? an epistolary novel? Some of these letters may be fiction laced with truths, or truth spiked with fiction. Covering about nine months, from late November to the following August, they follow the trajectory of a conventional novel, i.e. introduction of character/s and conflicts (intra- and inter-personal), rise in “action,” which in this case is the series of intertwined career and social/personal dilemmas, the climax, which perhaps fittingly occurs at “home,” in Norman, OK, and “resolution” between Susan and Marshall and Susan and D.

Is this an epistolary memoir? All truth, no fiction? Constructed memory, structured life when our lives have no such structure? The facts without all the accompanying flux? If you read the brief bio at the Avec website, Susan Smith Nash like the Susan signing the letters of this book has traveled to South America, to the former Soviet Union, to and from Oklahoma, but who is the real Susan? She never did tell us, did she?

Is this book an epistolary monologue? None of the letters were sent, or so the subtitle claims. None of the letters receive answers; none of the subsequent letters refer to letters the letter writer has received in response. Through the guise of letters to her sister, Tek, to Rialdi, Todd, D. (the recipient of roughly half the letters, to whom Susan is impressively frank, wide open about sexuality, past mis-steps, doubts about the present and future), to Aygun, Marshall, her teenaged son, and Jeffords, is Susan writing letters to Susan?

An epistolary dialogue? So personal are the letters readers can’t help talking back to her as they read (even if they can’t send what they say).

Ultimately the book tells us Susan, intrepid traveler, tells us Susan tentative parent, tells us Susan Renaissance entrepreneur, tells us Susan erotomanic mid-lifer, tells us Susan a person whose skills – geologist, computer educator, teacher, economic advisor – make her more employable than anyone I know insecure in every job, every new business venture she enters.

The book tells us Susan impulsive, honest, compulsive, compelling, tells us Susan a living worth telling, tells us Susan now sent.

Comments

[Susan Williams]

Your work is really ridiculous and will never make it in big circles.