Some notes on your novel, which character was I

I finished reading your book today, and I have a few remarks to make that I've put in the margins. On page 37, when you start describing someone with whom you were once in love, but who turned out to be an asshole, do you mean me? Am I that asshole?

On page 68 a rather tasteful but intense sex scene takes place. Some parts of which I seem to remember from a night in December that we spent at your parent's cabin. Though admittedly not all of the details match up.

On page 147 it sounds like you got some of the details of an argument we once had about divine foreknowledge a bit wrong. I did not say that the existence of God foreclosed any chance of free will. Though I'll admit that I implied it. I also didn't kick your cat off the window sill in a fit of rage. I gently moved her aside because she was taking up the sunny spot on that winter afternoon.

I can already hear you saying that none of this was about me, but I won't accept that as an answer. To accept myself as some peripheral character in your life, a bit player, would be to accept my own irrelevance. A fact which I'm constantly trying to avoid despite the universe's reminders. 

I've read somewhere that fiction writers don't always draw from life when they are creating scenes and characters. I'd like to know how that's possible. Where else are you going to draw from? I suppose you could draw from other books that you've read. Maybe that's enough. I wonder if someone has ever written a book where Nick Carraway spends the evening with Jake from The Sun Also Rises, but they just changed the names and the setting.

When I was in fourth grade I wrote a fantasy novel that was a take off on the Lord of the Rings stories. And by take off I mean that it just rehashed the plot using my own far less sufficient words and really terrible pacing. With this work, an aunt of mine once claimed that she thought I might one day be a writer. I wonder how she feels now. Probably she doesn't think of me. But if she did, I do wonder if she'd regret saying that because I haven't turned out to be a writer at all. I work in a library and tonight I finished a book that you'd written, even though I never thought you'd be a writer. Maybe this is as close as I'll ever get to being a writer, being an asshole on page 37 of someone else's book.

The point of the story is that I miss my aunt. She used to tell us elaborate stories about hedgehogs and giants that lived in the vast territory of our heads, beneath our rich, young and vibrant hair. These stories would involve moving from place to place, her fingers sliding delightfully across your scalp and the silly and wonderful things that these animals and giants would be getting up to. Really, you wouldn't believe it. I want to go back in time and tell  my aunt, after one of these elaborate stories, that she too could have been a writer.