Okay, so magazines get lots of letters, and all of them are crazy. Point conceded. I sometimes take a read through the letters at Harper’s, and those few that aren’t from geriatric Canadian socialists are definitely from nutjobs. And prisoners. Not to mention a few demonstrably dangerous people.
But at least they’re all real. That much cannot be said for the grandmaster of pornographic letter-publishing: the Penthouse Letters. Those are fake—not that there’s much debate about it. Everyone knows they are made up. I mean, how many times can the hottest maid this side of Timbuktu show up, clean your apartment, and shine various parts of your anatomy before a little doubt begins to creep in?
I was thinking about these letters, now grown nearly as obsolete as the book (or so they say; I’m still pretty deeply committed to eradicating as many trees as possible), when I came across this letter posted by Choire Sicha at the Awl. Here’s a taste:
Dear New York magazine,
My baby. My baby! Recently my baby had some tests. My baby is 2.5 months old. My baby! Sometimes my baby seems different than other babies. My baby should have be accepted to a very good college in the year 2025. My baby likes yams and dislikes all loud noises that are not the sound cows make. My baby has good arm strength but bad color-name recognition. My baby!
It’s signed, “A Parent, Brooklyn, New York.” Now, come on, people—bullshit alert! What kind of baby, raised in Brooklyn, doesn’t like yams and loud noises? Fake! And a “good college”? A true Brooklynite wacko-mom (and the tone here is clearly maternal) would definitely have said Harvard. Good colleges are for Queens, dear Choire. And let’s be honest, the middle-class babies born of middle-class graphic designers in Brooklyn, furiously scarfing their CSA organic sweet ‘taters—well, they just don’t have enough arm strength to write letters. Everyone knows that! Arm strength is very suburban.
Oh, some readers might claim that this letter was nothing but satire, yet another opportunity to have a laugh at the expense of over-thinking, pretentious urban parents (the sort who would wonder: “Do I want another baby as well? Would that be twice as much baby, or really more like thrice? Would I be betraying my baby? What if I had another baby and something was wrong with my baby?”). But I don’t think this letter is intended as a joke.
Humor of that sort would just be too easy.
Published by Theodore
Theodore Ross is an editor of Harper’s Magazine. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, Saveur, Tin House, the Mississippi Review, and (of course), the Vietnam News. He grew up in New York City by way of Gulfport, MS, and as a teen played the evil Nazi, Toht, in Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. He lives with his son, J.P. in Brooklyn, and is currently working on a book about Crypto-Jews.
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