BookLife Prize Entry - 2024

Plot/Idea: 10 out of 10

Originality: 9 out of 10

Prose: 9 out of 10

Character/Execution: 9 out of 10

Overall: 9.25 out of 10

Assessment:

Plot/Idea: A Letter Unwritten is Randy Rauh's moving memoir about the travails and triumphs of his mother, Betty Jo Ann "Jo" Rauh, and his wife, Bonnie Helm, beginning with his mother's birth in 1939 and ending in 2023 with his journey to the meadow where he and his wife took their first walk together.

Prose: Rauh's prose is direct and fearless; while taking the reader through his family's struggles and victories, he shows readers the ugly as well as the lovely. Nor does he shy away from the mistakes he realized with the benefit of hindsight. And while the book is deeply emotional, he can also see the absurdity that comes part and parcel with life. 

Originality:  A Letter Unwritten takes a unique approach to memoir, as it focuses on the lives of an author's wife and mother as told through a sensitive masculine lens and supplemented with family letters. 

Character/Execution: Rauh does a wonderful job of bringing his family to life; by sharing their joys and sorrows, Bonnie and Jo come across as real women, with all the complexity that entails. He also vividly conveys additional family members, from daughters and friends to estranged relatives.

Date Submitted: January 13, 2025

BookLife Review

Rauh’s heartfelt portraits of both his mother and wife offer a peek into the lived experiences and realities of American women in recent decades, people whom, he notes, society would never commemorate with a statue but whose lives are “nonetheless heroic.” His mother, Betty JoAnn, married at 18 to the much older Lee Rauh, had to contend with Lee’s abuse and take over the responsibility of bringing up her three little children when Lee was institutionalized with schizophrenia. While shaken by this, young Randy, happily, went on to marry his high school sweetheart, Bonnie Helm. Due to health complications, she was unable to have children, so the couple adopted Megan and Matthew as Bonnie faced multiple serious health challenges with courage. Rauh’s sincere portrait of these two strong women celebrates their contributions to the family and the community.

Rauh’s treatment of his father’s story, both sensitive and nuanced, illuminates the long-lasting impact of abuse and domestic violence across generations. Rauh explores the belief, held deep in his heart and reinforced by his physical resemblance to his father, that he could follow in Lee’s footsteps and destroy his own family. That conviction, he writes, made him reluctant to have children, to the point that he felt relief when Bonnie faced a hysterectomy. Initially indifferent to Bonnie’s attempts at adoption, he found that the children’s arrival transformed him, with Rauh becoming a loving father, celebrating their presence.

Powering the narrative is Rauh’s admiration and devotion both for his mother and his wife. He appreciates their inner strength, their cheerful and hardworking natures, and their willingness to place others before themselves—Rauh’s eulogy for his mother, printed here in full, abounds with warm wisdom. Also compelling are his accounts of quitting and rejoining churches, first moving away in light of a loved one’s account of potential abuse and later acknowledging that he had stayed away so long because he “considered myself unworthy.” This is a heartfelt, often moving read.

Takeaway: A son and husband’s sincere memoir of two American women of heroic strength.

Comparable Titles: Christopher Sorrentino’s Now Beacon, Now Sea, Brian Morton’s Tasha.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A