I would be going home by myself. And there was something sad about that but also something natural. I thought about what it would be like to get in my car, to turn the key in the ignition, to hear the last radio station I had listened to flicker back to life. I would be alone in the comforting way it is possible to be alone in one’s own car. I would drive the arching freeways in their beautiful loops all the way back to my small apartment that would smell stale but also wonderfully of home.
“I can’t believe it’s over,” Vera said. “It just seems so weird that it’s over. It’s so weird that we don’t live there. Travel is a really weird idea if you think about it. I mean, what is the point of it?”
I was too tired to come up with an amusing rejoinder. “Vera,” I said, “I have to tell you something.”
“You’re not really my father?” Vera guessed, then laughed uproariously at her own joke. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. “What is it?”
“It’s just…I wanted to tell you I love you,” I said.
“Ugh,” she said, “you’re getting cheesy, I can already tell. I could spread you on a cracker.”
“No, really,” I said, and I took her by the shoulders and looked into her face, which was still puffy and swollen. “I love you the way you are,” I said. “I love you any way you are.”
She hugged me and said into my shoulder, “You’re like one of those horrible cheese-stuffed pizza crusts.”
When she pulled away, the shoulder of my shirt was wet from where she had been crying, and Katya drove up and popped the trunk. I loaded in Vera’s Hello Kitty luggage, and opened the door for her to climb in back because Katya had a hideous amount of garbage in the front seat: fast-food bags and water bottles and discarded sweatshirts all tangled in a pile. What a mess! It endeared her to me, endeared both of them to me somehow.
“See you soon, Papa,” Vera said, and I swung her door shut, and away they went into the night.
Acknowledgments
A thank you as big as the Ritz goes to my friends and family. Thanks to Simone Gorrindo for being my best friend, but also for being clear-sighted when I was snow-blind from so many drafts. Thank you to David Isaak for pretty much exactly the same reasons. Thank you to my mother, who literally read this entire book to me on the telephone so that I could hear how it sounded in her voice, and who discussed the characters with me as though they were real people that we knew. Generous and patient don’t come close. Boon, blessing, gift — all are inadequate.
Thank you to my husband, Sam. For all the evenings you read my words out loud to me as I played blocks with the boy, for all the car rides in which you listened to me explore and plan and worry, for all the lunches at our secret hotel where I confessed my most half-baked ambitions — for all these hours I cannot pay you back. I cannot hope to pay any of you back. My debt is solid and gloriously heavy, and I feel bound to each of you in a way that I would not trade for all the world because I feel certain now that, having already invested so much, you are going to have to keep me for good.
As always, thank you to Molly Friedrich, who is honest and terrifying, brilliant and breathtaking, a dragon in the form of a smallish woman. Thank you to Jennifer Jackson, who somehow knew what this book needed before I did and who gently nudged me in that direction, allowing me always the illusion that it was entirely my own idea. You are my best and only and favorite sheep-crab. And thank you to Nichole LeFebvre who is an amazing reader and an amazing writer and who spends far too much time helping me. Thank you to all the people at Knopf who are so fantastic and excellent at everything they do.
I am also indebted to Mikhail Iossel, who took a chance on me as a writer before I had ever published a word and let me come to Vilnius to study and write and fall in love with that city. Thank you, too, to Laimonas Briedis who is more impressive and more interesting than Darius could ever be, and whose book Vilnius: City of Strangers every single person should read because it is brilliant. Thank you to Katie Farris, Emily Gould, Jacob Howley, Sherril Jaffe, Reed Johnson, Joe Kertes, Eglė Kirilauskaitė, Erika Lastovskyte, Daniel Mackler, Ramune Mazaliauskiene, and Val Vinokur for reading and advising me along the way. And thank you to Werner Herzog, for actually saying the words: “Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.”
A Note About the Author
Rufi Thorpe received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2009. Her first novel, The Girls from Corona del Mar, was long-listed for the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize and for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. A native of California, she currently lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and sons.
An Alfred A. Knopf Reading Group Guide
Dear Fang, With Love
by Rufi Thorpe
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s conversation about Dear Fang, With Love, Rufi Thorpe’s mesmerizing and emotionally potent new novel about a young father who seeks to better his relationship with his troubled teenage daughter while on a trip abroad.
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the Miłlosz poem that prefaces the novel. How does the content of this poem relate to the themes explored in Dear Fang, With Love?
2. In the opening lines of Chapter 1, Vera writes to Fang, “At this moment, we are mental twins.” How did you interpret Vera’s relationship with Fang when you were first introduced to their correspondence? Why is Vera drawn to him? How did the inclusion of Fang’s letters in the latter portion of the narrative destabilize Vera’s narrative authority?
3. Describe Vilnius, as interpreted through the eyes of Lucas and Vera. How does the checkered history between ethnic groups affect the city’s cultural identity?
4. On this page, Lucas admits, “I had never developed the set of paternal reflexes and instincts I assumed would assert themselves.” Over the course of Dear Fang, With Love, would you argue that these instincts do emerge? If so, when are they most apparent?
5. What are Lucas’s motivations for the trip to Vilnius? What does he seek to learn about himself? His heritage? How do Vera’s motivations for travel differ from her father’s?
6. Throughout Dear Fang, With Love, the reader becomes intimately acquainted with Lucas’s insecurities and anxieties. Discuss his discomfort with fatherhood. How does guilt factor into his relationship with his daughter? Would you say that he is “simple,” as Vera states in her letter to Fang?
7. How did the textual interplay between Lucas’s narration and Vera’s e-mails to Fang affect your reading experience? How did it help to elucidate or complicate the narrative?
8. The story of Grandma Sylvia and her “rape birthday” causes a great deal of tension and reflection throughout the course of Dear Fang, With Love. How does Lucas’s search for truth create anxiety throughout the narrative? How does his discovery that Herkus’s mother was indeed the child of Sylvia’s forest husband, rather than the SS officer, affect him? How does his relationship with Vera change after he reveals the true story of Sylvia’s escape to her?