For men only

Dear Mr. You
Mary-Louise Parker
Scribner
2015, pp 240, Rs 1,650

Mary-Louise Parker, the luminous, bright-eyed actress, makes her literary debut with the equivalent of a one-woman show. Even though Dear Mr You is nominally about men, there’s no question about who has the starring role. This book is enchantingly arranged as a set of letters to men who have mattered to Parker, many of them alive only in her memory or imagination. But the narrator has endless ways of upstaging them, and why not? They exist in Dear Mr You only to define who Parker is and how she got that way.

The book is written in a smart, beguiling voice that is inextricably entwined with qualities that Parker radiates as an actress. There’s as much flintiness as reckless charm. Flirtation and mischief are big parts of her arsenal. So is the honest soul-searching that gives this slight-looking book much more heft than might be expected.

Dear Mr You is not a memoir. It’s deeply intimate without naming names. If you want to know why Parker never mentions the apparently absent father of her son, go read a gossip site. But if you want to know how she feels about men fathering children, that’s right here. In a standout letter entitled “Dear Future Man Who Loves My Daughter,” she says this, in the voice that gives her book such backbone: “If she has given you children, remind yourself every day of the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth words in this sentence.”

And when she writes about her own father, who died in 2010, it’s clear that she still reveres him as the main man in her life. “This is your family I am running here,” she says about herself, her son and her daughter. “I can’t take credit for more than remembering to point up to you when I do something right and for continuing to put one foot in front of the other when I lose heart.”

But not even family ties can keep the erotic heat out of Parker’s self-portrait. The letter entitled “Dear Grandpa” describes her grandfather’s work as a miner and his worries about having his only son (her father) stationed in the Philippines near the end of World War II. But it quickly segues into this: “In 43 years, your granddaughter will be found hitchhiking by the side of the road near San Francisco. She will stand there with two young men who’ll encourage her to hike up her skirt and look as winsome as possible by the off-ramp.” And Parker will doubtless stop traffic. It won’t hurt that the three have a sign reading, “Marin, please, we’ve read Sartre.”

What’s the best part of that sign? The crazy politeness of “please”? The presumption of “Sartre”? The predictable destination? These kinds of details sparkle through this book’s epistolary memories. Its tone is brave and warmly conspiratorial, neither of which has ever hurt an already well-known, professionally adorable person when it comes to attracting readers. That Parker’s book is so seriously good seems like overkill.

But it is. Despite the dangers of a repetitive format, Dear Mr You has remarkable range. Parker has referred to these letters as thank you notes. But they’re apologies, too, and they describe many kinds of passions felt and lessons learned.

The attention-getting “Dear Blue” finds a young Parker bagging kelp and spirulina at a food co-op in Malibu, California, while dreamily involved with a surf Adonis in a loincloth. This sounds like one of the sunniest, most carefree times of her life. One of her pungent asides mentions “throwing a block of Gouda up at the ceiling fan to see if it would come down in chunks.” Another finds her and a friend dancing on top of the machines at a Laundromat “with some mild flashing of body parts at passers-by if we’d drunk a few beers.” A helpful dog would bark at men without laundry trying to enter the place.

But Blue, the loincloth guy, saw the weakness in Parker. When she was propositioned by one of his friends and said yes because she couldn’t say no, Blue wasn’t perturbed. But he apparently chose to leave her behind. A lot of the men in this book did, but she has written about them mostly with the wisdom of hindsight, not with anger. And unlike most of us, she’s found a way to articulate the goodbyes she never said when she needed to.

The letters sure to get the most attention are the book’s most fanciful and most poignant. The first is “Dear Cerberus,” a dreamy one in which three bad boyfriends take the form of a three-headed dog. This does nothing to dim their credibility or that of the heroine, first seen in a tutu. “She was funky and dreamy, with real baby fat and a wiggly mouth,” Parker writes, again upstaging all the hounds around her alter ego. “Floating through the East Village, she was a muse waiting to happen.”