If Nobody Calls, I'm Not Home: The Open Letters of Bim Nakely

by Samuel Hazo

Bim Nakely, an outspoken single woman in her mid-seventies, has retired from her job as a seamstress. Having raised her niece’s two sons after her niece’s death and having lived to see both of them happily married, she now feels “unnecessary.” She has no regrets, but she cannot help feeling somewhat passe. Although her adopted sons and their wives revere her and stay in touch, she feels that her real purpose in life is behind her. To compensate for this void, she begins writing never-to-be-mailed letters to people she admired in her life---her niece Lottie, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mae West, Pope John XXIII, Ernest Hemingway, Gypsy Rose Lee, Rita Hayworth, Charlie Chaplin and others, all of whom possessed a unique courage to face challenges and survive them. Bim’s letters to them reveal her inner struggles with similar challenges against the background of events and changes in the United States and the world during the middle decades of the twentieth century. It takes several unexpected happenings to make Bim realize that she, like everyone at any age, can still become suddenly necessary in ways she never expected or imagined.

Genres: Fiction

141 pages, Paperback

Published March 5, 2020

About the author

Samuel Hazo is the director of the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh, where he is also McAnulty Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Duquesne University. His books include The Rest Is Prose, As They Sail, Stills, and This Part of the World, the latter two published by Syracuse University Press. His translations include Nadia Tueni’s Lebanon: Twenty Poems for One Love

Reviews

[Bill O'driscoll · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short epistolary novel by a venerable Pittsburgh man of letters, in the voice of an older working-class woman who writes to famous people (Chaplin, Hemingway, Mae West) she's never met in the early 1960s. Bim has had one of those remarkable ordinary lives, touched with tragedy and everyday triumphs. Her common-sensical musings make for a good-hearted immersion in a different era, one that readers can imagine she shares much of with her creator, who is now in his 90s (and who, like Bim, is a life-long Pittsburgher of MIddle Eastern ancestry).