Customer Reviews

Dear Everybody

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A friend told me that Dear Everybody was a great read and he is absolutely right. I couldn't put the novel down and read it through in two rushed sittings. The novel is about a man, Jonathan, who is writing letters to all of his family and friends, short, funny, beautiful, and wistful letters about his childhood, being a teenager, a young man, and married. They are suicide letters but the novelist makes it so that the reader feels the whole range of emotions -- often humor balanced with tender sadness-- throughout (the character talks about thinking he was the Burger King as a kid b/c of the paper crown he got). And the novel also includes other people -- his mother writing in her diary about her difficult marriage and concerns about her son, and Jonathan's ex-wife about how much she fell in love with him but also about how she couldn't be with him -- and things like the main character's college notebooks. There's so much going on in this novel, and it's done so well that it really captures your imagination. Once you finish you just want to start reading again (I did). The review in Time Out New York says all of this better than I can! But Dear Everybody is the best book I've read in years and I'm going to get my book club to read it. I highly recommend it.

A hauntingly beautiful, funny, and ultimately sad story of this one man who struggled to keep his place in the world. This is a great book.

A totally unique story told in a totally original way! I loved piecing together Jonathan's life through the bits I was given: Lists, letters, diary entries, receipts. There was a way in which it was mysterious, like a puzzle. But, then again, it was all right there in this very honest, open way.
You'll love it!

I almost didn't want to finish this book, because I didn't want to let happen what I knew was going to happen -- I cared that much about Jonathon. The passages are sometimes very funny and sometimes terribly sad, and sometimes both at the same time. I breezed through this novel, but the words, images, feelings and people in it have attached themselves to my brain and they walk around with me everywhere I go. The author does an incredible job, giving us just enough glimpses and fragments of Jonathon's life, asking us to stitch those together into a deeper, richer understanding of that life, than if the author laid it all out for us. Almost reminds me of a Seurat painting. I only wish Jonathon could have read this book, because then things might have turned out differently.

I wasn't sure how I was going to respond to the letter format, but by the end of the first page I was completely absorbed. I wanted more and more. I guess I just have to wait for the next offering by this talented author.

I related to this book for many reasons. First of all, to produce a novel in the form of letters is a creative idea to begin with, but Michael Kimball pulls it off masterfully, with a hint of genius. The protagonist, Jonathon Bender, dies on page one but the travels of his life prove to be an amazing journey.

The portrayal of Bender's various struggles with his mental illness are portrayed sensitively and accurately by Kimball. You never feel pity for the character nor do you become disgusted by Bender's decompositions; you only pull for him the way one would pull for any likeable character. This is a brilliant, enjoyable, heartbreaking book and I recommended it highly.

Dear Everybody is the life of weatherman Jonathon who commits suicide. Starting from his death and going back, his brother Robert helps tell you Jonathon's story for himself and the readers. Robert collects various diary entries of his mother's, letters that Jonathon wrote to a wide variety of poeple, interviews with people who knew Jonathon such as his parents, and more to tell this story of a life who tried so hard...yet couldn't make it.

I'm a big fan of stories told in this type of manner, and I think it was very effective. The story allows you to see inside the mind of Jonathon and those that knew him, yet never truly gives you the reason behind his death for when it comes to suicide, it's hard to ever get the real answer. Dear Everybody is a quick read, yet very interesting and true to life. This book tells the tale of infidelity, mental illness, and the fact that life is often hard to manage.


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There's so much pain to this story about a man who committed suicide. Told through a series of short letters he wrote (but never sent) to every member of his family, his teachers, ex-girlfriends, even the Easter Bunny, the novel tracks his whole life from tragic beginning to tragic end. In between there is humor, sadness, and a struggle to survive. I tore through this book in matter of days.

Michael Kimball's third book, "Dear Everybody," will kick you hard in the ass! It's about a disturbed weatherman, Jonathon Bender, age 32, who kills himself. I think the jolts in it come from the fact that you can't help but identify with his mental decline. Albert Camus, the author of "The Myth of Sisyphus," and one of Algeria's finest sons, said: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide."

The literary device the author uses to tell this tragic and sometimes funny tale of Jonathon's "short life," works. It's a moving story told from a collection of diary entries; unsent letters; notes on conversations from family, friends and an his ex-wife, Sara; news reports; articles and even Jonathon's "Last Will and Testament." They were assembled by his younger brother, Robert, from whom he was estranged, after his death.

For review purposes, I'm going to focus on Jonathon's youngest years since they foretell his destiny. The signs were there early on that he was a troubled, highly sensitive child, who possessed a very lively imagination. He wrote notes, never dispatched, to his parents, "Santa Claus," the "Easter Bunny," and to the "Tooth Fairy," as well.

When the family went out on a day's outing to Lake Michigan, (they were living in Lansing, MI), Jonathon, then age five, said that when they got home, he pretended "to be asleep" in the car. He was hoping one of his parents would pick him up and "carry him into the house." That wish, like so many, didn't come true.

His mom, Alice, loved him the best she could, but the father, Thomas, didn't. His dad was a traveling salesman with a short temper who never really bonded with his oldest son. He admitted later to his youngest boy, Robert, that he didn't want to have any more kids for fear it would be "another one like your brother."

Even at the hospital after Jonathon's birth, in 1967, the father said that he didn't look like him because of the reddish color of his hair and skin. Perhaps he thought that he wasn't even his child. How could Jonathon not know, on some deep psyche level, that his own father had so roundly rejected him?

There is, too, an ugly scene when Jonathon, only six years old, got a soda out of the refrigerator and refused to close the door. His father--it was during the dogs days of summer--lost his cool, and began repeatedly hitting him. The mother had to intervene and stop him. She hinted at the fact that she, too, had been on the receiving end of her abusive husband's unholy wrath.

Eckhart Tolle in his tome, "The Power of Now," labeled these kinds of negative experiences, "an emotional pain-body," which then occupy both the "mind and body." Jonathon, sadly, had a lot of these life-sucking energies stored up in his badly scarred soul.

What does a beating from your own father, for little or no reason, have to say to a youngster of such a tender age? I think it can say this to the victim: "Betrayal!"

I can remember my father, who worked on the docks, giving me a whipping with his belt. Where do parents get these dumb ideas of discipline from? I can't recall the reasons why, but I do think back on some of them. The last time it was suppose to happen, I was about eleven. We both knew, however, that it wasn't going to be. His ass was going to be on the floor, if he took that route one more time with me. The beatings ended there!

What is fascinating about this novel is how Kimball tells Jonathon's heartbreaking narrative from many different perspectives. You read Jonathon's fanciful thoughts about what he honestly believes is going on in his life. Then, you're nonplussed to see that his school teacher, his mom, dad, brother Robert, his shrink, and others, such as his ex-wife, Sara, totally disagree with his account. Jonathon was mostly, out-of-the loop--a lost soul--on his own, solitary journey. Few, if any, were listening to and/or aware of his feelings. It was a journey of an often tortured mind, whose contacts with reality fluctuated wildly.

In some ways, Jonathon reminds me of my late brother, Charles, who slowly drank himself to death. Charles was one good looking dude, "Black Irish" he was. The women loved him, but he was always angry. I couldn't figure out why? Charles became an alcoholic and died before his 55th birthday. A high school buddy of his, later told me, Charles was the "loneliest" guy that he had ever met. He needed a heart transplant, but Charles wouldn't stop the drinking. What's another name for that?

Getting back to the novel. Jonathon is the only three-dimensional character in "Dear Everybody," and that is how it should be. It's all about him, his agonizing loneliness and his steady nose dive into a delusional abyss. Others have supporting roles in his drama. We only know them really from a distance. This includes his parents, brother Robert and the ex-wife, Sara, too. There is more than enough, however, in this novel, to feel Jonathon's rooted pain of growing up in a dysfunctional family, where many of his most intimate contacts were--imaginary!

The book has a number of themes in it, but I think it's the psychological one that dominates. As I read "Dear Everybody," I kept asking myself: "What is happening to Jonathon? Is there one incident or many that will contribute to his tragic ending? Was he predestined to exit his life with a big `F... you!,' to humanity?"

In summing up, "Dear Everybody" is first-rating story telling. Kimball's book will grip the reader at emotional levels. Even though you know up front what's coming, you will be caring about the painfully lonely Jonathon, right up to his very last breath.

a book like this comes along and really sweeps me off my feet. In short, this book was funny and tragic wrapped up in real world situations that we all go through at one point or another. Simply amazing.