12 Comments

Thanks, Max! A rite of passage, no? Holden would totally be vaping & bitching in the life guard station

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Great stuff, Dan! Happy to get such vivid pictures of your life there, among all else. I haven't gone back to Holden in many years, though he and the redoubtable Glass family are in some sense always with me. I can just picture that Wilder stride :-)

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Hey Genevieve! Thanks for reading! Yeah, Holden ain't changed at all--but lordy, have I. He seems extra sad now but the NYC he's running around in is pretty great? Not a CVS in the whole book. Must take the kids there someday. Big hugs from NZ!1

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Fantastic writing. Your voice is like a brisk wind. I look forward to reading more of these letters to Aotearoa.

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Thanks, Hamish! Honored to have you here!

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nice Dan....and you brought me to a cold beach in Nantucket where my brother lived so many years ago...an island nation where I also questioned whether I belonged..... Catcher in the Rye was a read that also takes me back to the days of a prep school I attended for a short two and a half years as a pre adolescent ...attending only due while my father taught there....it was a shame sham and like so much of youth the odd lessons I would not understand until much later....like Salinger you stir my memories of the singularity and the lonesomeness of youth.....save the joy you and family are experiencing rising in the netherlands you call NZ ;) .......your writing so close to within ....I look forward to more of your dispatches cheers mi amigo

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Thanks Dave! Glad you dug it. Windy beaches do that thing with the soul, don't they. A teenage sort of soul thing, I think? So happy the letters will make it to Lincoln St. Abrazos!!

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I am full of gratitude for this beautiful meditation, both for how it explored what the “this-ness” of the human condition can be at times, and how one exists as an expat in the liminal space between the US and its antipodean siblings. I can’t wait to read what comes next.

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Thanks, my antipodean expat brother!

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Lovely writing! The catcher in the ryeversdale.

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Thanks, Tim!

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You write very well Dan! We studied catcher in school in NZ, for sure it would hit different now. I had the exact same experience at Riversdale, Holden wouldn't have handled the cold haha

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