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“Can you ever forgive me?” response
- The most surprising thing to me was that even after Lee was exposed for selling fake letters, she kept digging herself into a hole. She actually went one step further by actually stealing valuable letters and selling those.
- This relates to “writing in your own voice” because that was exactly the opposite of what Lee did and that is what she struggled with. Writers are artists, and people want to have writing careers because they have something to say. When Lee was going through writer’s block, she didn’t have anything to say, so she started impersonating other artists. Her “best writing” was not her voice, and a career (if you can even call it that) of impersonating other people cannot have been a fulfilling one.
- I think the title being a quote from one of the forged letters could mean that Lee is, on some level, aware of her wrongdoings. Because it comes from a forged letter that she wrote, it shows, in a way, how her own voice shone through her impersonations.
- Lee used multiple strategies to create authentic-looking letters. Some specific examples I remember were tracing signatures and putting the papers in the oven to age them. If Lee focused this mental energy on her own writing, I bet she could have written something really amazing. The lengths she went to in order to create the forgeries show that she is smart and creative, and she definitely had a strong personality. As I mentioned in the third question, her voice was coming through the letters that she forged. She had all the tools to create great writing of her own, she was just focusing her energy in the wrong place.
- The lesson I learned from this movie was that when you have passion and talent for something, you don’t ever lose it. Instead of resorting to things that may be morally wrong or aren’t you being authentically you, compensate to solve your immediate problems (such as Lee’s financial issues) in other ways while always internally working on feeding your passion and caring for yourself so that you can do what you love to the best of your ability. A question that the movie left me with is how do you know if you should keep someone in your life or not? Lee’s friend added pros and cons to her life, but did the pros outweigh the cons, or the other way around?