Dear Everyone, - Paperback

by Henley Carr (Author)

In 1963, twenty-two-year-old Martha McCaffray set sail for Florence, Italy, to study painting and live a year entirely for herself. In sixty letters home, she chronicled her days of art, travel, friendship, and freedom - a brief window when she chose passion over expectation. Within a year of her return, she was a wife, a mother, and a woman who, unbeknownst to her at the time, would set her paintbrush down for good.

Sixty years later, those letters are unearthed and entwined with a modern narrative of grief, ambition, and self-discovery through womanhood. What begins as a portrait of a young woman's bold year abroad becomes something more - a mirror reflecting the timeless struggle between societal expectation and personal truth.

Dear Everyone, is a work of narrative nonfiction that braids Martha's mid-century letters with a contemporary voice reckoning with the same questions: What does it mean to choose yourself? And what is lost when you don't?

For readers of Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton and The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan, this is a story for every woman caught between who she is and who she's expected to be.