2025-I Hope This Finds You Well - Natalie Sue

 

“I had many rejections and didn’t find a publisher for two other books,” she said. “I really didn’t expect this one to get published.”

Writer Natalie Sue’s comments to the  2025 Leacock Medal “Meet the Authors” dinner in Orillia hinted that this never-to-be-in-print assumption was freeing and may have allowed her to be more adventuresome, biting, and creative.  Natalie’s funny and well-crafted novel I Hope This Finds You Well was due to be feted the next evening as the year’s medal honoree.

Her comments made me smile for several reasons.  One was the echo of a keystone event in her book.  The cynical narrator, Jolene Smith, likes to add “extra sugar” to office emails with a postscript message made invisible with white font. Words written with the belief that they would never make their way into print or be read by anyone else. Like her real-life author, Jolene’s presumption would prove to be flawed.

The non-publishing comment also amused me because this had been the subject of much of the conversation at our dinner table.  My wife and I sat with two of the year’s Student Humorous Short Story contest winners: first place award recipient Nina Yu of Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute in North York and a runner up Hamza Siddiqi, as student at Father Michael McGivney Catholic Academy in Markham.   They were supported by family members that included Nina’s mother and her twin sister Selina.  Hamza sat with his dad, a Toronto City engineer.

Both students along with Iris Matthews, another runner up who attends Bear Creek Secondary School in Barrie, were required to read their short story entries before the audience that night. All presentations were impressive in content and delivery, and, as my wife noted later, all the stories had a tech angle.

Over dinner, we learned that these clever and witty teen writers were dedicated students with careers in research, medicine, and other technically challenging fields in their sights.  But even though humour writing was the focus of the evening’s event, I was surprised to hear Nina and Hamza also talk about aspirations to write funny books, get published, and maybe win awards like the Leacock Medal someday.  They asked me for tips on overcoming setbacks and living with rejection.  I’m not sure what I did or said to make them think I had expertise in this arena.  I do, but I still felt I wasn’t much help.  My words may have even worked to dissuade them from fulltime writing and to support their technology and science-based career interests.

When Natalie Sue made her comment from the stage, I could see from their faces that it made the students reflect, and I took the opportunity to encourage them to read I Hope This Finds You Well.

I thought it might help them in their writing, but also in their lives.

The novel opens in the dire, fluorescent-lit corporate offices of a big-box chain called Supershops. Jolene spends her hours judging her coworkers with snarkiness that flows through her head and often into those white-font “invisible” messages.   Alterations to the IT system meant to control Jolene’s use instead gives her unfettered access to colleagues’ emails, personnel files, and text messages.  This launches a voyeurism binge that provides Jolene with more raw meat for snarky comments but also rattles her with confirmation of her worst fears.  Learning what people have been saying behind her back, however, not only makes her look at herself differently, but also those around her.

She finds herself reading not just inboxes, but inner lives - troubles, ambitions, insecurities, grief. She learns that the people she’s been trashing are, in fact, human. Flawed, but mostly just trying to survive the same deary corporate system she is.

This is where the novel truly lifts off. What could have been a one-note workplace satire turns into something far more nuanced and poignant. The narrator’s tone softens, and there are fewer wise cracks.  But the humorous voice persists in the second half of the book. Now layered over vulnerability and empathy.  

The storyline is made richer and more relevant to our dinner table discussion because of the intertwining with Jolene’s new Canadian family.   Her Iranian heritage involves generational tensions, cultural conflicts, and abiding love that I think would resonate with many people  including our dinner companions.

Natalie Sue approaches both communities - corporate and familial - with the same incisive eye and complicated affection that the best of Stephen Leacock and past Leacock Medal winners feature.  The author steps back just far enough to see the quirks and flaws, but never so far that she loses connection.

So, I Hope This Finds You Well offers a kind of dual ethnography: one of a dysfunctional office and one of a multicultural community.  Both are full of particular customs, passive-aggressive communication styles, and moments of grace.  Natalie Sue’s brilliance lies in holding both up to the light with the same dry humour and emotional precision.

When I recommended it to those students at my table, I was thinking that Natalie’s book captures an insight into the skill set you need in any profession—not just as a writer, but as a doctor, professor, or spreadsheet analyst at Supershops. Learning to live with, laugh at, and even love the messy communities we find ourselves in - whether chosen or inherited - is what helps us survive. Maybe even thrive.

Natalie Sue may have written this novel thinking no one would read it, but in doing so she’s given us something piercingly funny, open, personal, and generous. It’s a reminder that the best humour doesn’t just observe - it connects.

The students followed up the dinner with emails to me, and I would like to meet them again someday.   If I do, I hope they will have read Natalie’s book, and, of course, I hope that future encounter finds them well.

The book is nicely paced, and written with a coherent storyline, metaphors, characters, and dialogue that are quirky but authentic. It’s the kind of writing that makes me envious and could inspire the young humorists at our dinner table.

But it can also teach them a bit as aspiring humans who will find that rejections and personal interactions are the most challenging element of any career.