How to Save Your Own Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

shows how intelligent plus warm you are. I spoke to our minister who is supposed to be very forward-minded but he didn’t say anything really that was Practical. I know your Jewish and maybe that doesn’t apply but the Old Testament people were Jewish and they certainly knew alot us Christians could be helped by. Hope you won’t think I’m a bigott. Actually my girlfriend is Jewish and youre Main Character (which is also you I believe) is exactly like me in all respects though Jewish. Please write right away or even you could call me Collect in San Antonio because I am so desparate plus beside-myself and I hope this is not an Imposition. I married my husband for security but I think he also fools behind my back (I have Proof too) and why shouldn’t I have a night off to see my girlfriend not to mention other men though I am not that kind-of-girl.
    Thanking you in advance for all youre help.
    Sincerely yours,
Mrs. Henry Laffont
    P.S. I love the Book!!! My Girlfriend also does too.
    P.P.S. My husband told me I better not read it or he would beat the shit out of me but I read it anyway!!! He thought it might give me idears!!!
    Dear Celia Laffont: (Please don’t call yourself Mrs. Henry ...)
    I love you, and your letter made me laugh and cry, but I don’t know where to begin to tell you what to do. Come to New York and I will baby-sit for your children and put you all up in my apartment while you finish school....
    But of course I never sent such a reply. Nor did I phone. I sent a card, with no return address, which read: “Dear Celia Laffont, Thank you so much for your beautiful letter about my book. I wish I could answer all your questions, but I am hard at work on a new book which I hope will be more help than the first. Warmest wishes, Isadora W.”
    Salvation. Everyone in the world wanted salvation. Candida had stated the problem but hadn’t begun to solve it. And who could solve it? I had everything, supposedly, and couldn’t solve my own dilemma; what on earth could I possibly do for Celia Laffont? If I ever get the time to write another book, I thought, I am going to call it How to Save Your Own Life- a sort of how-to book in the form of a novel. Hah. That was ridiculous. Imagine me saving lives when I couldn’t save my own. Actually, How to Save Your Own Life was the title of a notebook given to me by Jeannie Morton, who’d encouraged me to use it as a journal. But I had stopped keeping a journal. Keeping a journal implies hope, and in the last year I had given up hope. Was it because I had gotten everything I thought I wanted?
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    Bennett’s key clicked in the lock at 6:15. I was still sitting at the round dining-room table pondering my stack of letters. Mooning over it. Not knowing how to go on after my per functory answer to Celia Laffont. There were forty-five calls to return (from the three days I’d been away) and a dozen bills to pay and ten book-length manuscripts by my writing students, and a stack of galleys to read. Three were friends’ novels; I would have to read each one with care and think of tactful things to say. But the others were by strangers and could be put aside for the moment. Reading was becoming more and more of a chore. I yearned for the days when I could sit down with a copy of Bleak House or Tom Jones without thinking guiltily of the galleys on the floor by my desk. Besides, the books I was sent always seemed to reflect badly on my writing-or my character. I felt misunderstood by the galley-senders. Typecast somehow.
    One was the sexual journal of a man who’d left his wife to jeep through California with two nubile teen-agers. One was a treatise on male superiority, tricked out as a “breakthrough book” and “the first cogent male response to the Women’s Movement.” And one was a young woman poet’s attempt to write a porn novel with literary pretensions. There were any number of novels about