Dear Everyone,

Sixty years apart, two women chase the same question: What does it mean to choose yourself? In 1963, twenty-two-year-old Martha McCaffray set sail for Florence, Italy, to study painting and live a year entirely for herself. In sixty letters home, she chronicled her days of art, travel, friendship, and freedom — a brief window when she chose passion over expectation. Within a year of her return, she was a wife, a mother, and a woman who, unbeknownst to her at the time, would set her paintbrush down for good.

Sixty years later, those letters are unearthed and entwined with a modern narrative of grief, ambition, and self-discovery through womanhood. What begins as a portrait of a young woman's bold year abroad becomes something more — a mirror reflecting the timeless struggle between societal expectation and personal truth. Dear Everyone, is a work of narrative nonfiction that braids Martha's mid-century letters with a contemporary voice reckoning with the same questions: What does it mean to choose yourself? And what is lost when you don't?