The second day of fall threatens to be what Rachel Syme, ’05, calls the “Day of the Wrong Coat.” Humid and hot in the morning, it’s gone drizzly and cold by afternoon. Syme, a staff writer for the New Yorker, relishes such days, even when—maybe especially when—she chooses the Wrong Coat. “It is more than anything a day about noticing, about realizing that the winds are shifting,” she writes in her eccentric and ebullient new book, Syme’s Letter Writer: A Guide to Modern Correspondence About (Almost) Every Imaginable Subject of Daily Life, with Odes to Desktop Ephemera and Selected Letters of Famous Writers. “What was your most recent Day of the Wrong Coat? It might make a good subject for a letter.”
As it happens, Syme will have to find another topic for her next letter—a languishing literary form that she loves and is trying to revive. She turns up for our appointment in the Right Coat, a houndstooth blazer—not too light, not too bulky—with a red heart appliqué on the arm. In person, she comes across much as she does in her articles and social media posts: particular, vivid, warm, stylish. We are meeting at Yours Truly, Brooklyn, a tiny stationery boutique that sells French mechanical pencils, cat stickers the size of peppercorns, and all manner of greeting cards. “There are so many cute things here, it’s like a candy store for me,” Syme says, fanning out the diaphanous pages of a hard-to-find Japanese airmail pad.
As we’re checking out, buyer and shop manager Debbie Chong says, “Wait, are you Rachel Syme?” Chong is answered in the affirmative, and her face lights up. “I’ll take a Polaroid and put it on the store’s Instagram! Why did I think you’d be taller?” The previous week, Syme (she’s 5' 2") had posted about Yours Truly on Instagram. Within the day the shop gained between 50 and 100 new followers. “It was wild,” says Chong. “We’re just a little paper store.”
‘Letter writing is a time-consuming rebuke to a world that tries to optimize every activity into a seamless slipstream.’
While not quite a household name, Syme has become something of a celebrity in literary (and now, apparently, stationery) circles. “I’m obsessed with her perspective on culture,” says Sara Neville, until recently an editor at Clarkson Potter (an imprint of Crown Publishing), who first approached her with the idea for Syme’s Letter Writer. “In one breath, she’d riff on Zelda Fitzgerald and Diana Vreeland’s letters, tell me everything I needed to know about fountain pens, and give me a dozen recommendations for books to read, stationery shops to check out, and new (to me) cultural icons to research.” Syme matter-of-factly lists her areas of interest as follows: “Hollywood, style, fame, women artists, sparkly and frivolous things.” Last year for the New Yorker she profiled film director Sofia Coppola, eulogized fashion icon Iris Apfel, interviewed Girls creator Lena Dunham, chronicled the end of the short-lived Broadway musical Lempicka, traveled to France to write about perfumer Francis Kurkdjian, and reported pieces about, among other topics, piercing studios and the boomlet in gourmet cannabis edibles. “It’s kind of astounding how prolific she is,” says Syme’s friend Dana Stevens, the movie critic for Slate. “She’s omnivorous and energetic and she works ridiculously hard.” Now, with her new book, Syme hopes to reinvigorate an all-but-forgotten corner of culture: snail mail.
During the isolating early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, while some of us were learning to feed sourdough starter, Syme decided “on a whim” to launch a free online initiative to match pen pals around the world. “I spent a lot of my 20s and 30s in New York City trying to make it as a freelancer and feeling lonely, and what you realize at the end of the day is people want to feel like they’re not alone,” says Syme. “I thought, how can I help with that?” PenPalooza, as she christened the initiative, was her answer. “By harnessing the power of snail mail, PenPalooza breaks past the ephemeral and terse world of social media to reintroduce the time-honored idea of pen pals,” CNN reported in late 2020. The project, which Syme oversaw in her spare time, brought together some 15,000 letter writers in 75 countries. “Five sets of pen pals have traveled internationally to meet each other now,” Syme says. “I’m very proud of that.”
A few lucky strangers ended up with Syme herself as a pen pal, receiving elaborately ornamented, perfume-scented epistles into which Syme likes to tuck stickers, incense papers, magnets, homemade bookmarks, and other bits of ephemera. “It was super-duper hot, both of us were living in top-floor apartments with no central AC, and I sent her a recipe for watermelon gazpacho,” says Amy Willen, a nurse-midwife in Chicago. “Then we just connected.” Letters led to gifts (Willen sent Syme a monstera plant; Syme sent Willen Brazilian brigadeiro cookies), then to phone calls, an invitation to Thanksgiving, and now a robust real-life friendship. Syme: “As it turns out, long-term epistolary relationships are perhaps the best way to get to know someone to their core.”
Syme’s Letter Writer invites the rest of us to join in, whether we choose to initiate correspondence with strangers or bang out letters to friends, parents (“Sometimes, for better or worse, our families are the demanding, expectant audience that makes us tap-dance with the most desperate and yet dazzling verve”), childhood teachers, even ourselves. “In one of our first meetings,” says Neville, “she shared that she wanted the project to feel like you were chatting up the chicest, most knowledgeable broad at a swanky New York cocktail party. Her voice is undeniably that broad.”
“Letter writing is a time-consuming rebuke to a world that tries to optimize every activity into a seamless slipstream,” Syme writes, “and there is joy to be had once you fully embrace the medium’s outdated extravagance.” Fittingly, the book itself is a work of outdated extravagance, a festive potpourri of essays about how to write gossipy letters, fan letters, bitchy letters (“Think of deploying cattiness in your letters like tweezing an errant eyebrow hair: Go in surgically, yank quickly, and move on”), and love notes, as well as tips on choosing the right perfume with which to spritz your stationery (go for powdery scents like violet and heliotrope, which cling most tenaciously to paper), thoughts on how one might “wade into the sensuous world of sealing wax,” musings on typewriters (“weighty and loud and unreliable, but they also infuse the otherwise static act of writing with a kind of sweaty dignity”) and, on almost every page, maximalist collages of stickers, postcards, vintage photographs, and French, Thai, and Malian stamps. “I’m still trying to find a way to talk about the book that doesn’t make it sound like a little trifle,” says Syme. “What it is supposed to be is really fun, madcap, and energetic, and make you want to write and connect with people and laminate some matchbooks.”
At first glance, Syme’s Letter Writer does indeed look like a bagatelle—retro and bubbly as a chocolate soda. But beneath the dizzy fun of it runs a profound personal ethos that is anything but trivial. Throughout, Syme is calling on us to find ways to live with more gusto, pay more acute attention to the world around us, express ourselves with more precision and flair, share what we learn more generously. In one section, she suggests that we choose a topic—“a word, a color, an actor, a genre of music, a slice of film history, a sport, an ingredient, an animal, a poet, a smell, a flower, an artist, a historical period, a city,” and then “curate a seasonal engagement with the idea, privately and purposefully, as if you were in charge of putting together a class syllabus or a cultural festival devoted to this specific thing.” Syme suggests that such “intentional cultural safaris” will give us something to write letters about—and maybe realize it isn’t really about the letters at all. What you choose to pen is downstream from opening up your eyes, expanding your world, enriching your life. “You have to approach everything as if it might be really interesting,” says Syme. “You don’t have to always be online, or always thinking about the latest trend, but if you want to stay relevant, you have to always be monitoring the world.” A short list of Syme’s own intentional cultural safaris of recent years: women indie film directors of the ’80s and ’90s; biographies of late-19th-century French stage star Sarah Bernhardt; hotels. She recently wrote “Liza” on a sticky note—one of several stickies in any given week—as a reminder to delve into the universe of famed actress and singer Liza Minnelli, because “she was so full of life and zesty and funny.”
“I became a reporter to monetize nosiness,” Syme says. “I want to know how everyone does everything.” Raised in Albuquerque, the elder child of two doctors, Syme grew up performing in musical theater and dreamed of becoming an actress. “But I always wrote,” says Syme. “And I was obsessed with magazines. I read Entertainment Weekly and fashion magazines and the New Yorker and newsweeklies. If I wasn’t going to be an actress, I wanted to write about actresses.” At Stanford, she majored in English, minored in art history, and wrote for the Daily. She moved to New York City after graduation and “never looked back.”
She began a master’s program in journal- ism, but she also had an internship and soon decided she wanted to jump right into working. “It’s an apprentice industry,” says Syme. She quit school and threw herself into pitching stories. In the early days of her career, she wrote for publications both mainstream (Elle, Time) and alternative (the Awl, the Millions) about everything from actor James Franco to a tie-dye shop to her love of caftans. “For a long time, I thought I had to be a different kind of writer so people would take me seriously,” says Syme. “But there’s something really serious about doing something silly well.”
‘Think of deploying cattiness in your letters like tweezing an errant eyebrow hair: Go in surgically, yank quickly, and move on.’
In 2015, when the New York Times Fashion section was nosing around for a freelance fragrance writer, Syme parlayed an adolescent love of Bath & Body Works sprays into a niche, giving herself a crash course in all things perfume. (For the record, today she is wearing Vanilla Skin by Phlur, which she picked up to see what “all the young people on TikTok” have been raving about. She approves.) Syme went on to win four Perfumed Plume Awards for her fragrance writing, one for a 2016 New York Times piece on the ascendance of animalic scents, with names like Bat and Beaver. “Maybe it’s the desire of millennials to reclaim their beastly odors in an age of technological detachment,” she wrote, “but fragrance buyers are newly excited to smell as if they come from an elegant zoo.”
Syme has not limited herself to writing about perfume. “I am very entrepreneurial but not in a smart business way. I just like starting stuff,” she says. “There’s a camp counselor/cruise director quality to me that I indulge.” Initially on Twitter and now on Instagram, she periodically adopts the persona of Perfume Genie. Followers can submit a few words describing a mood for which they want to find a corresponding scent, and Syme replies with a match. Example: “Wedging clay and throwing pots in a nearly empty junior high art classroom, and my teacher is playing Chopin on a record player.” Syme: Vanille Benjoin by Affinessence. “I basically start with whatever image pops into my head when I read what they want to smell like,” Syme told NPR in 2020. “Something conjures to me.” Multiply that interaction by 100 over the course of an hour and you get a sense of Perfume Genie.
Genies aside, in 2020 a wish did come true. After years freelancing for the New Yorker, she was hired as a staff writer—probably the most coveted job in journalism. “I am a true New Yorker obsessive; I started reading the magazine in high school and was fully intoxicated by it, particularly by some of its legendary women writers,” Syme says. “It is hard to say what my ‘break’ was, other than sheer dumb luck meeting a sort of dreamy preparation. I had been reading the New Yorker for so long, and diving deep into its archives, that I felt both supremely daunted by the opportunity to join the ranks and also like it was territory I had been mentally mapping long before it was a place I was given entry to. Which is all to say, I still cannot believe it is real.”
Syme lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Erik Hinton, and their 23-pound rescue dog, Pierrot. Nights and weekends, she works on a forthcoming book, Magpie. “It’s going to be a cultural history of roving connectors and collectors, party hostesses, editors, people who can see the matrix of culture and are living creatively and artistically,” says Syme, who admits she doesn’t have the elevator pitch down pat yet. Magpies are “people who were influential and eclectically curious, but not necessarily in one discipline, people whose energy and interests shaped our world but sometimes behind the scenes.”
A week after our interview, I receive a letter from Syme. Sitting in the mail basket, it looks like a florid missive sent from the year 1893, penned by a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria. The envelope, addressed in swooping gold calligraphy, is almost entirely sheathed in vintage-style stickers of human eyes, an artichoke, a branch of coral, many flowers. Inside is a gracious thank-you note, as well as a sheaf of featherweight goodies: droll food stickers, a laminated list of Edith Wharton’s “ruling passions,” pages from a Desperately Seeking Susan note pad. This thoughtful, sumptuous little parcel activates some kind of childish pleasure center in me. The experience of opening it is not unlike how I used to feel unpacking my Christmas stocking. A totally unnecessary and atavistic gesture, this letter. The word befitting it is one I’ve never used unironically. It is enchanting.
Jennifer Reese, ’88, is a writer in Brooklyn. Email her at stanford.magazine@stanford.edu.
