Dee Grachek’s Love, Me: Letters I Wrote When I Wanted to Disappear is a hauntingly beautiful memoir that refuses to fit into neat literary categories. It is part confession, part prayer, and part poetry, written in the form of letters that bare the author’s soul with startling vulnerability. Through these letters, Dee Grachek opens the door to her interior world, inviting readers into the quiet spaces where shame and hope coexist, where faith and fear wrestle, and where a woman learns to love herself into being after years of silence.
Each letter feels like a breath held too long finally being released. Dee writes to God, to hope, to her younger self, to the Church that turned its back on her, to the body that has been both home and battleground, to the father whose love she yearned for, and even to the songs she can no longer sing but still remembers. These letters are not simply addressed to others, they reach inward and outward at once, touching every reader who has ever felt unseen or unworthy. The addressees are sometimes literal and sometimes symbolic, but each one reveals another layer of Dee’s life as a transgender woman learning to exist unapologetically in a world that often tells her she should not.
