Dearest Virginia (Woolf) is a conversation across time with some of the writers who shaped Jody Kennedy's life-Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, and Jack Kerouac, among others-woven alongside poems and essays that move beyond these correspondences. Through lyrical reworkings, Kennedy walks with Woolf back from the River Ouse, adopts Sexton's fierce devotion to language, revisits Plath's The Bell Jar from the vantage of sobriety and parenthood, returns to Hemingway's American Midwest landscapes gathering up a few more broken-off pieces of an earlier self, and finds perspective in Kerouac's On the Road. Braiding memory, dreams, and literary tribute, the collection explores a shared history of mental illness and alcoholism, moving between adolescence and adulthood to consider artistic inheritance, resilience, forgiveness, and the quiet ways literature accompanies us through our darkest and most meaningful moments. Tender and unsparing, Dearest Virginia (Woolf) asks what it means to carry the voices that once saved us-and how, in listening closely, we learn to live our own stories more fully.
