Shana

December 27, 2007

Dear Mr. Pinkwater,

I am a 28-year-old social worker who has to deal with all sorts of complicated human problems every day at work. One of my most trusted ways to relax in the evening is to pick up one of your books, open to a random page, and read from there. It’s interesting that I find your books so soothing when they are about such exciting and absurd topics. But I can honestly say that The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death puts me in a deep meditative state!

Mr. Pinkwater, your books tap into something very powerful: It’s the comfort of repetition (obscure movies, hot foods, old cars), the value of unlikely friendships, and the quest to find one’s own meaning in life.

Incidentally, I spent half my childhood in the rumble seat of a 1936 Packard. What a car.

Shana

This is an example of something I have known about art since practically the beginning. If you do it right, even if you are a person as devoid of serious content or insight as I am, if you make it right, the reader, or viewer, or listener, will somehow be able to personalize, derive meaning or comfort from it. This is why completely inarticulate and usually drunken abstract expressionists were able to make wonderful paintings. So you, 28-year-old social worker, find that you are tapping into something very powerful in books of mine, by which you mean in yourself, of course. All I can take credit for is making the books according to the rules of art as I understand them--and the proof is in your own personal pudding.