San Francisco, California
October 11, 2000

Dear Readers,

Way back in July, I received an email from Sam Sifton, an editor at Talk magazine, in New York, who said he had a recommendation for Open Letters. “I have a friend,” he wrote,

who’s in a halfway house right now, in western Mass., after a tailspin of vodka and heroin. She writes the most incredible letters from there – denied the phone and her computer and its concomitant link to the Web, she just *writes*. They’re beautiful letters, unencumbered by the neatness of word processing. It’ll take a while to get a hold of her, and to see if she’d be willing, but I think it’d lead to great stuff for you.

The friend was named Jessica Willis; Sam had been one of her editors, a couple of years back, at the New York Press, where she wrote about music and nightlife and New York.

As Sam predicted, Jessica was a little hard to reach, but finally, with his help, she and I got in touch, and she mailed me photocopies of a few handwritten letters that she’d sent to friends back in the spring. One, written on Easter Sunday to her friend Bill, struck me as a particularly powerful summary of the trip she’d been on, and it became today’s letter.

Since Easter, Jessica’s moved from a halfway house to what she calls a “three-quarter-way house,” also in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She’ll be writing new dispatches for us from there in the coming weeks.

Jessica’s letter is part of our week of letters from correspondents whose lives are intersecting in some way with the mental-health system. Yesterday: Miriam Toews in Winnipeg on why she decided to start studying psychology. Tomorrow: the first installment of a two-part letter from a young woman in Cork, Ireland, about a recent stay in the psychiatric ward of the Mercy Hospital.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough