ISBN: 0395689961
May 1995
To Purchase
amazon.com
barnes & noble

June 1999
To Purchase
amazon.com

One day when I was in Connecticut visiting my mother, I dumped a bag of mail I’d brought with me from New York onto the bed. As I went through it, I noticed a strangely crumpled piece of paper among the envelopes. It was an anonymous letter addressed to Goat from Ram. It was a highly literary and bitter response from a rejected lover. I have no idea how it got in my mail. At first it was so disturbing that I tore it up. Then I suddenly thought, “You idiot! This is your next book!” and desperately taped all the little shreds back together. Thus was born the The Love Letter, about a bossy, highly independant, controlling, flirtatious bookseller named Helen who finds an anonymous love letter, then falls in love with a nineteen-year-old boy. I wanted to write a novel about forbidden love and secret passion, and I realized that so few things are forbidden anymore. But a middle-aged woman and a nineteen year old boy…that’s something you still might want to keep from your mother.

The Movie

The Love Letter came out in 1999. Kate Capshaw and Tom Selleck star in it. I had nothing to do with anything, but everyone was extremely nice and I especially like all the the scenes that were not in the book, most of all the scene in which all the firemen on their firetruck sing.

Reviews of The Love Letter

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, October 19 1995
Heartburn
by Claire Messud
Where would love be without the love letter? The messenger, the vessel of love, it is also, in Cathleen Schine’s charming fourth novel, its conjurer. It works its magic upon Helen MacFarquhar, a divorced mother of one in her early forties, who runs a bookstore in a well-heeled seaside town… (continue)

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, May 26, 1995
‘Letter’ Perfect
By Rebecca Asher-Walsh
Helen MacFarquhar, the owner of a small bookstore in a seaside town, seduces her customers with the written word as ably as Cathleen Schine woos her readers in THE LOVE LETTER (Houghton Mifflin, $19.95). A practical, unsentimental sort, Helen is knocked momentarily off balance by the arrival of… (continue)

LOS ANGELES TIMES, Sunday, May 7, 1995
It’s in the Mail
by James Wilcox
The pursuit of happiness may be one of those inalienable rights guaranteed by our founding fathers, but it’s not always a particularly noble nor a worthwhile pursuit. Some philosophers might even deem it a wild-goose chase. Happiness, they would argue, is a byproduct of an activity… (continue)