Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self
Joseph Galliano

If you were to write a letter to your 16-year-old self, what would it say?

In Dear Me, some of the world’s best loved personalities have written just such a letter. Dear Me includes letters from three knights, a handful of Oscar winners, a bevy of Baftas, an intrepid explorer, a few teenage pop stars, an avid horticulturalist, pages and pages of bestselling authors, a dishy doctor, a full credit of film directors, a lovey of top actors, a giggle of comedians and an Archbishop!

The letters range from the compassionate to the shocking via hilarity and heartbreak, but they all have one thing in common: they offer a unique insight into the teenager who would grow up to be…. Stephen Fry, Annie Lennox, Paul O’Grady, Jackie Collins, Fay Weldon, Alan Carr, Peter Kay, Debbie Harry, Brenda Blethyn , Jonathan Ross, Liz Smith, Will Young, Alison Moyet, Rosanne Cash, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Yoko Ono, Emma Thompson… to name but a few.

Dear Me is a really interesting and simple concept. If you could write a letter to your 16 year-old self now, what would you say? Joseph Galliano asked a ton of celebrities to do just that, and this book is the result.

There are a huge amount of letters in this book. There are those who took it very seriously and wrote heartbreaking pleas to their 16 year-old-self: Baz Luhurmann, Stephen Fry and Trisha Goddard. There’s also some sweet letters that reveal people’s fondness for their 16-year-old self, and the feeling they want to take themselves under their wing and tell them it will all be OK. There are also some funny ones: Peter Kay, Danny Wallace and Burt Bacharach.

I really enjoy dipping in and out of this book. The design is great and the letters are produced in the way they were sent – some are handwritten, some are typed, some are ever illustrated. Plus there are quite a lot of photos of the authors when they were 16 to give you an idea of what they looked like.  This book might well make you laugh and it may well make you also cry. I really enjoyed all the scoldings, the reassurances, the affectionate piss-taking of their younger selves. Well worth a read!

Rating: ★★★★★