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Dear Michelle,: Letters from an Old Friend in a New Life
Having had the chance to reflect on my own Peace Corps experiences, and knowing how fickle memory can be, I felt the necessity to write them down. What became of this project was a meandering epistolary, one which I both mentally dedicated and fictionally addressed to an old friend, Michelle. We met a lifetime ago on the roof of my freshmen dorm. We shared a long conversation then, and several others afterwards. We always imagined, to ourselves, that we would be together. I promised her that when I was ready to commit to someone, it would be her.
Life has a way of getting in the way, though. I learned this alongside college's so many other lessons. In ultimate testament to life's effect on well-laid plans, soon after we began dating, I received my invitation to serve in Ukraine. Knowing me, she encouraged me to accept, and knowing her, I knew it would be the last goodbye to a four-year dance which could not continue. Yet, in my youth, I promised her our relationship would last, that through phone calls, and more importantly, letters, we could give it the lifeblood it needed to survive. We would nurture it with words, written despite the distance.
"Dear Michelle," is what I wish I'd sent. Life got in the way, and we went our separate ways. Though the words themselves are edited for readability and grammatical purposes, they are raw, intimate glimpses of myself which Michelle deserved to see, and never did. This book, a collection of these letters, is the story of my time in Ukraine with the Peace Corps. The story is one of far more emotional resonance because, as I wrote the letters, often at the pace of once/month, I was not telling my story. I was telling my story to her.
As such, I hope you see in them something of yourself, whether in the writer, the reader, or Michelle herself. Thank you for considering my work, and I hope to hear from you soon.
Life has a way of getting in the way, though. I learned this alongside college's so many other lessons. In ultimate testament to life's effect on well-laid plans, soon after we began dating, I received my invitation to serve in Ukraine. Knowing me, she encouraged me to accept, and knowing her, I knew it would be the last goodbye to a four-year dance which could not continue. Yet, in my youth, I promised her our relationship would last, that through phone calls, and more importantly, letters, we could give it the lifeblood it needed to survive. We would nurture it with words, written despite the distance.
"Dear Michelle," is what I wish I'd sent. Life got in the way, and we went our separate ways. Though the words themselves are edited for readability and grammatical purposes, they are raw, intimate glimpses of myself which Michelle deserved to see, and never did. This book, a collection of these letters, is the story of my time in Ukraine with the Peace Corps. The story is one of far more emotional resonance because, as I wrote the letters, often at the pace of once/month, I was not telling my story. I was telling my story to her.
As such, I hope you see in them something of yourself, whether in the writer, the reader, or Michelle herself. Thank you for considering my work, and I hope to hear from you soon.
247 pages, Paperback
Published July 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 23, 2026
Samuel Gerard’s Dear Michelle: Letters from an Old Friend in a New Life is a collection of creative correspondence written by Sam, a young American Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine, to Michelle, a close college friend he left behind. Before departing, Sam promises to stay in contact, share his experiences with her, and make her the first person he visits when he returns to the United States. He begins writing only after months of silence, however, admitting that he avoided Michelle because writing to her would require him to confront the person he had hoped to escape by moving abroad.
Sam’s letters recount his life in Perechyn, a small Ukrainian village where he works with the local government. His experiences are often funny, particularly when cultural misunderstanding and alcohol combine. At a government celebration, he mistakes a request for a patriotic song as an invitation to perform “Don’t Stop Believin,’” bewildering and horrifying the assembled officials. After completing a last-minute grant proposal with two Ukrainian colleagues, he drinks with them, becomes locked inside the building with them, and helps engineer an escape through a window. Yet the comedy exists alongside persistent loneliness. Unable to speak the language fluently, Sam discovers that the outgoing identity he has always claimed is largely something other people gave him. He describes himself not as a social butterfly but as a social chameleon who needs other people in order to know what form to take.
When the mayor removes him from his position, Sam is transferred to Uzhhorod. The failure intensifies his central question: are the people he encounters better off for having known him? He worries that he came to Ukraine promising change while carrying unresolved problems he mistakenly believed geography would cure. Friendships with other volunteers sustain him, as do his English clubs and the generosity of Ukrainians such as Nina, his host, and Yarina, his service counterpart. A visit to Auschwitz sharpens his awareness of mortality and destroys his comforting fantasy that intelligence, adaptability, or likability could always save him.
The book’s most important theme is the danger of treating life as a story. Sam continually arranges experience into chapters, symbols, cinematic references, and meaningful conclusions. In the fictionalized “Before My Own Sunrise,” he attempts to reproduce the romance of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise during a night in Vienna. He meets Maria, wanders the city with her, and experiences something genuinely intimate, but she disappears before morning without leaving her number. The episode demonstrates both the appeal and inadequacy of imposing art upon reality: the night becomes meaningful only when it stops following the film and becomes imperfectly its own.
This habit also explains Sam’s treatment of Michelle. Although she is the book’s addressee, she remains largely absent; her letters are never reproduced, and her personality must be inferred through his responses. Only in the epilogue does Sam understand that he has reduced her to a character in his narrative, declaring their relationship finished because that conclusion suited the story he told himself. Her continued existence outside his interpretation becomes the moral fact he has overlooked.
Gerard’s prose is intelligent, observant, and frequently beautiful. He has a strong eye for Ukrainian trains, aging buildings, temporary friendships, and those small acts of hospitality that become permanent memories. The book can also be extremely discursive. Sam examines nearly every emotion from several angles, qualifies his qualifications, and sometimes turns a sharp insight into pages of explanation. This excess is partly the point: the letters document a young man thinking himself in circles. Nevertheless, some passages would gain force from greater compression.
COVID ultimately brings Sam’s service to an abrupt end, denying him the meaningful goodbyes and orderly conclusion he expected. That disruption reinforces one of the book’s central insights: life rarely supplies the satisfying resolutions that stories promise. Sam gradually accepts that Ukraine did not transform him into someone else; instead, it forced him to encounter the person he already was and reconsider the way he understood those around him. Dear Michelle is therefore less a fictionalized travel memoir than a thoughtful, candid account of a young man learning that other people are not supporting characters, change cannot be achieved through scenery alone, and life remains meaningful precisely because it cannot be written in advance.
Sam’s letters recount his life in Perechyn, a small Ukrainian village where he works with the local government. His experiences are often funny, particularly when cultural misunderstanding and alcohol combine. At a government celebration, he mistakes a request for a patriotic song as an invitation to perform “Don’t Stop Believin,’” bewildering and horrifying the assembled officials. After completing a last-minute grant proposal with two Ukrainian colleagues, he drinks with them, becomes locked inside the building with them, and helps engineer an escape through a window. Yet the comedy exists alongside persistent loneliness. Unable to speak the language fluently, Sam discovers that the outgoing identity he has always claimed is largely something other people gave him. He describes himself not as a social butterfly but as a social chameleon who needs other people in order to know what form to take.
When the mayor removes him from his position, Sam is transferred to Uzhhorod. The failure intensifies his central question: are the people he encounters better off for having known him? He worries that he came to Ukraine promising change while carrying unresolved problems he mistakenly believed geography would cure. Friendships with other volunteers sustain him, as do his English clubs and the generosity of Ukrainians such as Nina, his host, and Yarina, his service counterpart. A visit to Auschwitz sharpens his awareness of mortality and destroys his comforting fantasy that intelligence, adaptability, or likability could always save him.
The book’s most important theme is the danger of treating life as a story. Sam continually arranges experience into chapters, symbols, cinematic references, and meaningful conclusions. In the fictionalized “Before My Own Sunrise,” he attempts to reproduce the romance of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise during a night in Vienna. He meets Maria, wanders the city with her, and experiences something genuinely intimate, but she disappears before morning without leaving her number. The episode demonstrates both the appeal and inadequacy of imposing art upon reality: the night becomes meaningful only when it stops following the film and becomes imperfectly its own.
This habit also explains Sam’s treatment of Michelle. Although she is the book’s addressee, she remains largely absent; her letters are never reproduced, and her personality must be inferred through his responses. Only in the epilogue does Sam understand that he has reduced her to a character in his narrative, declaring their relationship finished because that conclusion suited the story he told himself. Her continued existence outside his interpretation becomes the moral fact he has overlooked.
Gerard’s prose is intelligent, observant, and frequently beautiful. He has a strong eye for Ukrainian trains, aging buildings, temporary friendships, and those small acts of hospitality that become permanent memories. The book can also be extremely discursive. Sam examines nearly every emotion from several angles, qualifies his qualifications, and sometimes turns a sharp insight into pages of explanation. This excess is partly the point: the letters document a young man thinking himself in circles. Nevertheless, some passages would gain force from greater compression.
COVID ultimately brings Sam’s service to an abrupt end, denying him the meaningful goodbyes and orderly conclusion he expected. That disruption reinforces one of the book’s central insights: life rarely supplies the satisfying resolutions that stories promise. Sam gradually accepts that Ukraine did not transform him into someone else; instead, it forced him to encounter the person he already was and reconsider the way he understood those around him. Dear Michelle is therefore less a fictionalized travel memoir than a thoughtful, candid account of a young man learning that other people are not supporting characters, change cannot be achieved through scenery alone, and life remains meaningful precisely because it cannot be written in advance.
July 7, 2023
Sam took an incredibly special place and with his thoughtful reflections and keen observations managed to lay it gently on the page. He laid all his thoughts and vulnerabilities out for the reader to connect with, understand, and feel along with him as he navigated a new and unfamiliar setting. This book carried Sam’s voice like he was sitting in the room with you having a conversation, each page was a chat with an old friend. He did an amazing job of capturing a really strange and wonderful time of my life, I hope this is the first of many books to come by this author.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews