Kellams: Tom Hapgood’s debut novel, "Lost Letters," probes how much of an unknown past should remain unknown. The novel’s protagonist, Jason, is convinced to submit to a DNA test to find out if he is genetically likely to develop early-stage dementia like his mother. The test delivers a result—and more—and that leads to even more discoveries that could alter the lives of others.
Tom Hapgood is an associate professor and head of the graphic design department at the University of Arkansas. He’ll sign copies of the book Sunday, Aug. 24, at Pearl’s Books in Fayetteville, and on Sunday, Sept. 14, he’ll be at Two Friends Books in Bentonville.
Readers—just like the characters in "Lost Letters"—quickly discover there is much to be revealed by the results of the genetic assessment that’s at the core of the story.
Hapgood: Which is one of the fascinating things. I’ve been looking into these DNA tests and these stories that spin out—these things that should’ve stayed secret, and just would have in the past. These, you know, changing lives and lies, and just all of these things that come together when people don’t really know what happened in the past, and maybe it should have stayed there.
And combined with just the technical sort of fears that people have about their DNA being out there, and companies going out of business, and things like that. So that’s interesting to just imagine how people sort of ingest that kind of information into their life to understand, “Okay, now what?” And then everyone else that it spins out into.
Kellams: So is that what happens when you take one of these DNA tests? You send in saliva. Because all Jason and his wife really want to know is: is there a chance he might develop early-stage dementia? But it gives all this other information. Can’t you just ask for that genetic test?
Hapgood: You can—unless you’re a curious wife and you see a couple of checkboxes and you think, “Huh, why not? There could be some fun cousins out there.” And so, you know, she checked some of those boxes just to—“Let’s just go ahead and get all the information we can.” He doesn’t really know what’s going on. He doesn’t trust the process. He just begrudgingly sort of does it. He doesn’t want, again, that data out there. He’s just sort of afraid of it all. But yeah, she opts in for more information out of the test.
Kellams: Some of this book takes place in the very recent past, in Fayetteville. Some takes place in the 1980s in Germany. A little bit more maybe doesn’t take place in even earlier Germany, but we learn about that. How did you decide to balance the different time frames? Oh—and there’s also Kansas City in the 1990s.
Hapgood: There is. There is. So the novel has—some of it sort of generally kind of talks about times in literally the 13th century, in a monastery in western Germany, all the way up through late ’80s, early 1990s in Germany, when a lot of American troops and families lived over there. And then of course some “quote” present-day in Fayetteville here. And it jumps through time.
It’s one of those books that kind of starts in the present and then jumps back and forth. And that was a little bit of a heavy lift for a first novelist, I think, to try to do that. It kind of disorients people. At the same time, it plays with memory—“Is everything true?”—and you’re sort of learning through the process, as he is, of what to pull together—these pieces from the past.
And so I kind of had to balance one—and this was an interesting process, as a new novelist—was dropping those little breadcrumbs along the trail for people to kind of get as they’re going, but not do it too quickly. And I reworked, I edited the book—I don’t know—ten times in the writing of it to get the pacing. The pacing of it is such a challenge.
So yeah, the whole thing has been a major learning process. And I feel like now I know how to do it. I mean, I hope. I think the book is good, and I think now for my next one—which I’m starting to work on—I kind of know how the process works. So it should go smoother. We’ll see.
Kellams: There’s—at the core of Lost Letters—questions about identity. Who you are when you find, perhaps, something out about yourself that you didn’t know. Jason, through this DNA test, finds out there’s family out there he didn’t know about. Then through academic research, he finds out more about other people that they don’t know—and I think might not ever really know. Jason’s wife also has to figure out who she is, or what her relationship is, because there’s something about her husband’s past that neither of them knew. So: identity. Did you mean for that to be—
Hapgood: Yes. And it is the theme of the book. A major theme of the book is something we all deal with in the world—as Americans, as just generally people—which is: how do we remember the past, keep it fresh, but also move on somehow?
And so he has these elements of his past life, and the past lives of those he’s now connected with, coming forward. We need to acknowledge it. How do we understand it, process it, but yet at the same time, be positive and move on? And be—you know—that sort of, I don’t know if it’s a balance beam that we walk on as modern people, to remember it, but also move on.
And so that’s a theme: sometimes you just make decisions not to tell somebody something or to move on. If someone doesn’t need to know something that will not help them—do you tell them, or not? This is sort of one of the questions I grappled with.
And do I know the answer? I don’t know. But I think they came to an arrangement in this book, towards the end, of just who should know what and what should be told. And just the weight of knowing something that you didn’t necessarily try to find out.
Kellams: Right. I mean, information gets thrown into your lap. And then: what’s the responsibility to do with that?
Hapgood: Right. And he’s kind of this unwitting character in a sense. He kind of goes into this whole thing. He’s pulled into it. He gets interested. He kind of sees what’s happening in his life and through history and how he’s connected to history. And then he makes a few decisions.
And there’s someone—you know, there’s an element of the book—there’s someone in it that he’s related to who knows what happened, let’s say, to the “lost letters.” And his wife and he decide not to ask, because they don’t want the answer.
Kellams: So it’s very much a story about Jason and his life. But there is this other element that’s about history. And I want to ask you about this—because it’s about post–World War II Germany as it divides into East and West, and the Cold War almost instantly starts.
Americans are concerned about the growing influence of the Soviets. They need West Germans to be their allies. Americans didn’t fight the Eastern Front—these Germans did. And so it’s revealed through this character that Americans went to former, certainly German soldiers—and I think we could say former Nazis—and became allied with them to find out more information. How much of this is true?
Hapgood: Right. It’s so interesting. I lived in West Germany from ’85 to ’90. It was the tail end of the Cold War. At any point, we had about 300,000 American troops over there. I was a military kid—I was a brat. Which is an acronym. Everything in the military is an acronym.
And it’s hard to say. It might mean “British Regiment Attached Traveler,” when the British colonial troops would go around and bring their families with them. It could be “barracks rat”—that the troops used to, the families would live with the troops in the barracks, so the other soldiers would call the kids “rats,” and so “barracks rat” became “brat.” Who knows? These might be backronyms, as they say. People are trying to move it to “mil kids” now, but none of us like that term.
But yeah, I was over there. I was seeing it as it was happening and unfolding towards the end. I learned about a group of kids in—1968—they’re called the 68ers, who were the college-age kids who came to realize the role of their parents. And the role of how a lot of those officials—and Nazis and German soldiers from the war years—had made it into the new government, and the new military, and various things.
And they were at odds with how that kind of continued, in the presence of these officials that had made it through. So the American military, the American government, were extremely happy to have German soldiers again who felt that they had a worth—and that they could, in fact, stand up with the Allied forces, who may need to go to battle with the Soviets in some near or distant future.
There was a famous—he shows up in the book—a former officer of the German military who was the only person in history to receive the highest civilian award from both Adolf Hitler and John F. Kennedy. He was high up—military—he was the Chief of the Army High Command during the early years of the war. So, he’s in there as a very prominent character.
But yeah, it’s this idea of—we had moved on from World War II, and then we were repositioning toward the East, and we needed the help of all those German soldiers who had just fought over there. They knew where the rail lines were, the factories, how the Soviets fight—all of those things. And so, we kind of brought them into the fold, with the British and the French.
And I’ve studied all this. I lived there. I think a lot of people don’t understand the postwar years—or care much. You know, it’s interesting—we had, during the Cold War, from the ’40s up through the late ’80s, early ’90s—we had, again, roughly up to 300,000 troops over there. And I read that about 1.5 to 2 million kids lived over there as these Army or military brats during those years. A lot of people.
The end of the Cold War generally happened—let’s say, roughly late ’80s, early ’90s—when the wall came down and the U.S. military repositioned. It’s staggering to see how we drew back all those forces, repositioned them, or stood them down. They had these BRACs—Base Realignment and Closures. Another acronym. Entire communities would just be shut down—including mine, in 1995.
An entire mini-city within Karlsruhe just went away. And there were marriages, and jobs, and schools. It was a very complex time.
And now, people may not really understand, or maybe it doesn’t matter as much, because you know—Russia’s taken care of and everything’s peaceful over there, so it’s all good.
Kellams: All right, I have to ask—because the main character in this book is someone who went to high school at an American high school in Germany, is a professor at the University of Arkansas… You’ve just told us you went to high school at an American high school in Germany. Your father was in the military. You are a professor at the University of Arkansas. This is not autobiographical… though?
Hapgood: [Laughs] You know what I did in 2020? I started writing a memoir. I thought—I was actually on sabbatical, even though a lot of us were [laughs]—and I started writing a memoir. I was writing some of my experiences of living over there, traveling through East Germany into West Berlin, Soviet guards and guns and dogs… So many of these experiences, I thought, “You know, I got about halfway through a memoir and thought, there’s a novel in this that’d be fun to write.”
So I just started writing it.
The people in the book—all the history in the book is accurate. The characters are based on memories—these wisps of people I kind of knew here and there. I don’t know if any of my colleagues or friends of the day would see themselves necessarily in any of these people, but I think they’ll remember some of the experiences.
Living in Karlsruhe—which is in the southwest of Germany. France makes a big point into Germany, and Karlsruhe was right at that point, the Rhine River. I think a lot of the friends that I lived with over there—Karlsruhe American High School alumni—have told me it’s really taken them back to the feel of living over there in those years, because it really was a fascinating time.
We would have drills where we’d be taken to the high school—where, in theory, we’d be carted over to the airfield and put on planes and flown out if there was an attack or the Soviets attacked. And so that was kind of always there.
When we had that sort of tiff with Libya in 1986, we were told not to wear our Levi’s or our leather jackets, and to not meet in groups of more than ten. We didn’t have school, we couldn’t have church. Along with the other threats—there were these kind of Red Army [Faction] terrorist gangs that would be bombing airports, discotheques, and various things.
So it was part of our lives—it was tense. But we were also those careless, omnipotent American teenagers living abroad and just living it up. It was a blast.
Now, some of my friends didn’t have the experience I did—because living as a military brat can be a challenge with family situations, moving every three years. My experience was amazing. My father was a lieutenant colonel who had retired and was now working for the U.S. Army. So we didn’t grow up in an extremely militaristic family.
I had the perfect experience. Whereas some of my friends who lived the brat experience had a bit of a tougher time.
Kellams: So, one other thing about Lost Letters. I’m talking with Tom Hapgood about his first novel. It feels great—and it looks great. Now, knowing what you do and what you teach, that had to be important to you as well, right?
Hapgood: Yeah. For anyone that sees it—I designed the cover and all the inside pages. The cover is a quick, interesting story: an alumna from Karlsruhe American High School—we all still kind of keep in touch—she took that photograph that you’ll see. It’s from 1966, of a parking lot with a lone car. Just an old VW Beetle in the corner. It looks like—it almost looks maybe apocalyptic, or abandoned.
It’s on the base. It was the old base exchange where we’d shop. I didn’t change the color or anything. It’s sepia-toned—the blues and greens have faded—and I thought it works perfectly for memory. And the way the parking lot lines recede into the background…
And again, that base where I lived has been abandoned since 1995. German people have moved back in, but I thought the cover was just right.
I did a lot of covers—I even did a video on Instagram about choosing the right one that I designed. Some of them got laughs. Some people liked them.
But I cleverly—this is sort of a design 101 trick—I left one of the letters out. I left the second “E” out of “Letters,” because it still phonetically reads correctly. It was the only letter I think I could take out where the word would still read correctly. It’s a lost letter. And then the bookmark has the missing stamped “E” on it—if you’re lucky to get the bookmark too.
So I had a lot of fun with the design of it.
Kellams: But it also feels good—the cover and the pages. Did you have anything to do with that?
Hapgood: You know, I self-published it. I really didn’t [control that part]. I was happy with the results. They showed up in a box, I opened it up, took it out, and did a huge sigh of relief. Because you sort of don’t know what you’re going to get.
I’ve got a second edition coming out, and I actually changed the paper slightly to that off-white, just to see if it looks different. That’s the one—if people order it now, they’ll get the second edition.
But I spent a lot of time on both the writing and the design. And I think that was an interesting process—because as I’m writing it, I’m also kind of looking at the page design. And somehow they interacted together. I feel like that might be a unique experience, because a lot of writers aren’t designers—and vice versa.
So I kind of went back and forth with the design and the writing a bit through the process. And I think every writer in the world would tell you not to do that, because you shouldn’t. Like, that sounds ridiculous even as I say it. But it was fun.
Kellams: The name of the book is Lost Letters. Tom Hapgood, congratulations. Thanks for coming in. Come back when the second novel is ready to roll.
Hapgood: Will do. Thank you. I appreciate this opportunity.
Kellams: Tom Hapgood’s debut novel is Lost Letters. He’ll be at Pearl’s Books in Fayetteville on Sunday, Aug. 24, and at Two Friends Books in Bentonville on Sunday, Sept. 14. Tom Hapgood is an associate professor and head of the graphic design department at the University of Arkansas. You can find out more about him and the book at tomhapgood.com.
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