A Reader Is Me!

I loved all the tiny little details about local histories: her work in the theatre, her work for television before the shows became properly scripted shortly after 1960 or so (I really need to read more about the history of television), her children’s books (although I would have hated them as a child). I loved the fad for “Nothing Books” in New York, and Hanff’s systematic planning of what she needs to read was extremely charming, somehow.

Her interactions with her fans were really crazy, though, especially from the point of view of an average European, clutching her pearls about privacy and privacy laws. Of course I do know European privacy laws are new even in Europe, and I do know as well that the rules about press reporting are less concerned with privacy in most anglophone countries, and I have read that book about press reporting in Japan in the 70s and 80s, with journalists basically camping on the lawns of politicians or suspects in criminal cases, and so on. But it’s still insane! Her fans knew her home address and telephone number. They would call her. They would send her letters. They would send her books to be signed (with no return postage, how rude!). Hanff quotes some of the letters and phone conversations, so one can see with one’s own eyes how wild this whole thing was. And well into the eighties!

It's a pity she didn’t write more about herself and some of her friends, like Genevieve Young, the literary editor and daughter of a Chinese diplomat murdered by Japanese fascists during the second world war. She seems an absolutely fascinating person, reaching leading positions in the industry when it was so hostile to women. But this is also where you can see how dated the book is: when Young got her US passport, Hanff writes in all innocence “The alien with the Chinese passport was finally an ordinary American citizen coming home” and then that Young was “as Chinese as General Motors”. Ouch.