“Dear Michelle,” by Samuel Gerard

Dear Michelle
Samuel Gerard
Peace Corps Writers (2022)
ISBN: 978-1950444458
Reviewed by Paul Knobloch for Reader Views (2026)
5*- A Life That Cannot Be Written in Advance

Samuel Gerard’s Dear Michelle: Letters from an Old Friend in a New Life is a collection of creative correspondence written by Sam, a young American Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine, to Michelle, a close college friend he left behind. Before departing, Sam promises to stay in contact, share his experiences with her, and make her the first person he visits when he returns to the United States. He begins writing only after months of silence, however, admitting that he avoided Michelle because writing to her would require him to confront the person he had hoped to escape by moving abroad.

Sam’s letters recount his life in Perechyn, a small Ukrainian village where he works with the local government. His experiences are often funny, particularly when cultural misunderstanding and alcohol combine. At a government celebration, he mistakes a request for a patriotic song as an invitation to perform “Don’t Stop Believin,’” bewildering and horrifying the assembled officials. After completing a last-minute grant proposal with two Ukrainian colleagues, he drinks with them, becomes locked inside the building with them, and helps engineer an escape through a window. Yet the comedy exists alongside persistent loneliness. Unable to speak the language fluently, Sam discovers that the outgoing identity he has always claimed is largely something other people gave him. He describes himself not as a social butterfly but as a social chameleon who needs other people in order to know what form to take.

When the mayor removes him from his position, Sam is transferred to Uzhhorod. The failure intensifies his central question: are the people he encounters better off for having known him? He worries that he came to Ukraine promising change while carrying unresolved problems he mistakenly believed geography would cure. Friendships with other volunteers sustain him, as do his English clubs and the generosity of Ukrainians such as Nina, his host, and Yarina, his service counterpart. A visit to Auschwitz sharpens his awareness of mortality and destroys his comforting fantasy that intelligence, adaptability, or likability could always save him.

The book’s most important theme is the danger of treating life as a story. Sam continually arranges experience into chapters, symbols, cinematic references, and meaningful conclusions. In the fictionalized “Before My Own Sunrise,” he attempts to reproduce the romance of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise during a night in Vienna. He meets Maria, wanders the city with her, and experiences something genuinely intimate, but she disappears before morning without leaving her number. The episode demonstrates both the appeal and inadequacy of imposing art upon reality: the night becomes meaningful only when it stops following the film and becomes imperfectly its own.

This habit also explains Sam’s treatment of Michelle. Although she is the book’s addressee, she remains largely absent; her letters are never reproduced, and her personality must be inferred through his responses. Only in the epilogue does Sam understand that he has reduced her to a character in his narrative, declaring their relationship finished because that conclusion suited the story he told himself. Her continued existence outside his interpretation becomes the moral fact he has overlooked.

Gerard’s prose is intelligent, observant, and frequently beautiful. He has a strong eye for Ukrainian trains, aging buildings, temporary friendships, and those small acts of hospitality that become permanent memories. The book can also be extremely discursive. Sam examines nearly every emotion from several angles, qualifies his qualifications, and sometimes turns a sharp insight into pages of explanation. This excess is partly the point: the letters document a young man thinking himself in circles. Nevertheless, some passages would gain force from greater compression.

COVID ultimately brings Sam’s service to an abrupt end, denying him the meaningful goodbyes and orderly conclusion he expected. That disruption reinforces one of the book’s central insights: life rarely supplies the satisfying resolutions that stories promise. Sam gradually accepts that Ukraine did not transform him into someone else; instead, it forced him to encounter the person he already was and reconsider the way he understood those around him. Dear Michelle is therefore less a fictionalized travel memoir than a thoughtful, candid account of a young man learning that other people are not supporting characters, change cannot be achieved through scenery alone, and life remains meaningful precisely because it cannot be written in advance.