Amanda's Letters to Jake

Amanda's Letters to Jake are a sequence of fan letters in which Amanda Pharrell turns admiration for Jake Scully’s fiction into an increasingly personal appeal. They document her reading, her ambitions as an unpublished writer, and her effort to make Jake both a literary model and a potential advocate. Their significance lies in the distance between the confidence Amanda projects on the page and the recognition she is still trying to secure.

Form and Purpose

Each letter begins with a direct address to Jake, making the reader encounter Amanda’s account in her own words rather than through a neutral description of her. The format lets her move freely between praise, career news, requests, and claims of kinship. The letters are not merely reports of what she has read: Amanda shapes them as arguments for why Jake should notice her, take her writing seriously, and respond.

The first letter combines enthusiasm for Jake’s books with an explanation of how she came to them. Amanda says her mother had not allowed her to read the series when it first appeared; after discovering Burn, she bought the remaining books in a gold box set featuring Eve on the back. She wonders whether to continue before rereading the first novel, because she thinks she may have read it too quickly to catch everything. Her excitement is already shadowed by the prospect of reaching the end of an author’s work: she describes the sadness of finding a writer she loves and knowing that, eventually, she will run out of books.

Amanda’s Writing Ambitions

Amanda presents herself as an aspiring author who has not yet been published and has accumulated about thirty rejection letters. She acknowledges that writers are supposed to find their own style and stories, yet describes trying to learn from writers she admires by taking bits and pieces from them. The tension between artistic independence and emulation is explicit: she hopes that borrowing from the greats will eventually help her become great herself.

She has also written a short piece about Eve and Adam, the protagonists of Jake’s series, and enclosed it with her letter. Amanda knows that some writers dislike this kind of work, but explains that the characters have stayed in her mind since the first page and that she needed to write them out. She describes the piece as somewhat sexy and emphasizes her passion for the characters. Her appeal is therefore not limited to asking Jake to assess her own original writing; she is offering him evidence of how intensely she inhabits his fictional world.

Amanda asks whether Jake might show her work to his agent, Cary Minnow. She has already sent Cary some writing and received a standard rejection letter. Rather than accept the rejection as a settled judgment, she speculates that he may not have read her manuscript, citing agents’ workloads and the pressure to find work that is on trend. She contrasts herself with that imagined trend, insists that she is different, and suggests that a connection to Jake might make Cary take her work more seriously. The request reveals how she hopes admiration for Jake might become a route into professional recognition.

The Follow-Up Letter

In a later letter, Amanda is unsure whether Jake received her previous one. She recalls writing on the tenth and accounts for his possible silence by pointing to the attention surrounding a recent movie option. The letter shows her following his public career closely: she has cut out newspaper interviews, praises a review in the Times, and is assembling a scrapbook about his writing career.

That scrapbook leads her back to Jake’s early struggles. She has read that he wrote four books before Burn was published, and compares his lack of early success with her own experience: her first novel was rejected by twelve publishers without any feedback. She also recalls that Stella Scully had told him he would not make it and should focus on his degree. Amanda treats these details as grounds for identification, telling herself that she understands the way people laugh at her commitment to writing. She asserts that her own work is good and imagines Jake having known the same about himself before success arrived.

Admiration, Identification, and Requests

The second letter places Amanda’s aspirations beside Jake’s achieved career. She envies his book signings and radio appearances, recalls watching an eager Jake on a GenreCon panel on YouTube, and describes him as more confident now. Her attention to a perceived twinkle in his eye on BookWeek allows her to imagine that success has not made him take his achievement for granted. She also expresses confidence that he will not permit the Last Light Chronicles series to become a poor, computer-generated Disney film adaptation.

Amanda’s familiarity extends to a taped session Jake filmed at his house for The Morning Show, which she praises as evidence that he has made it. She tells him how proud she is of him, then again asks him to look at her writing, which she has attached once more. Her confidence that he will be impressed and that natural talent cannot be faked sits alongside the evidence of repeated rejection and unanswered correspondence. She closes with a specific request: a signed copy of Burn. She says she has read it seven times, needs a new copy, and would treasure one that had been in Jake’s hands.

Across the letters, Amanda’s admiration repeatedly becomes a claim to closeness: she writes as a fellow writer, a reader who understands Jake’s early disappointments, and someone who believes that knowing him could change how others regard her work. The correspondence preserves both the sincerity of her engagement with his books and the self-presentation that serves her requests. Jake’s response is not established in these passages; what they make clear is Amanda’s sustained effort to turn a distant literary attachment into personal and professional recognition.