I had a pair of yellow labs — Jake and Dylan.

I babysat for this couple with a son named Jake, and his friend Dylan. I never mentioned that it reminded me of my dogs.

Oh, I do know them, and I love them with my whole heart.

Isn’t Clarissa silly? I tried watching the BBC miniseries yesterday, and it was just too silly to finish, even with a young and heavy-lidded Sean Bean.

Oh, hard question! Now I’m blanking on any epistolary novels at all! I loved Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy a lot from when I was a kid. Have you read those? A little bit of eugenics ideology apart, they are wonderful.

Hahahahah, I laughed helplessly at your parenthetical finish. I used to baby-sit, no lie, for a couple called Andy and Andrea. They made me think of the Raggedy dolls but I did not say so to the parents or the kids.

Really? Those are the surnames in your reading primer? I don’t know if my reading primer people had names, partly because I barely recall my reading primer at all. I must have had one but it’s lost to me.

A man-crush is where I have a platonic crush on a dude. I have to distinguish it from a real crush, because I don’t have sexy love feelings for Bill Nighy. And I am still undecided about whether I have such feelings for Sean Bean or not.

Right? Right? Why are they named that?

Whoa, is that happening? Surely they’ll leave out the daisy chains. Daisy chains are silly. Nobody could make daisy chains unsilly.

I am possibly a little too cynical for books that are love stories and nothing else. Or else too impatient? I don’t know, this book didn’t sound a lot like something I’d have loved, but I went with it because of the epistolary aspect. And yeah, it wasn’t something I’d love, it turns out.

What else has she written? I had never heard of her before.