September is a time of renewal. It’s the beginning of the new school year, and in the Southern Hemisphere, September marks the start of spring. For actress Brittany Snow, it’s when she decided to change her life.
Snow has been open about her struggles with mental illness and eating disorders. In 2007, she told People magazine about her experiences with anorexia, depression, self-mutilation, and receiving treatment in an inpatient facility. In that article, Snow recounts how, as a 16-year-old, she read an article about a model who had similar disorders, and it was the first time she felt seen and like there was a way out. According to her new book, September Letters, Snow carried that article around in her pocket. Years later, her own article made a similar impact on young girls.
“Shortly after my article came out, I was at a coffee shop when a young girl came up to me, eyes brimming with tears. The girl reached into her back pocket and pulled out my article. I realized then how our stories are always connected,” Snow writes in September Letters, the book accompaniment to her and Jaspre Guest’s website of the same name that highlights letters from experts and friends.
“It was this full-circle moment when I realized that everybody’s stories are, hopefully, helping someone else,” Snow tells Shondaland, “and that’s what going through these struggles is all about: realizing that you can get through them, and if and when you do, there’s someone else that’s going to need that help. September Letters is the idea that we can share our vulnerabilities and our strengths, and hopefully, help someone else.”
The website launched in 2020, which was certainly a time when people were seeking connection to others in a way that would still allow them to remain safe. “This had been an idea that we had for a long time, but during Covid it became that much more pertinent that we explore it and we make it a reality,” Snow says.
The book is a mix of letters from the website, interviews with mental health advocates and experts, and notes from celebrities, such as Tom Hanks and Snow’s Pitch Perfect co-stars Anna Camp and Chrissie Fit. Snow explains that she and Guest each picked a selection of their favorite letters from the site, and the ones that made it in were those that overlapped. All the letters go through a vetting process with a licensed therapist to make sure they’re not triggering to readers, but otherwise the majority of them make it onto the site. “We don’t necessarily think one problem is less or more important than another. Depending on the person, they’re all just as vital and important,” Snow says.
September Letters is being published on May 23 during Mental Health Awareness Month rather than the perhaps more obvious month of September. Similarly, Snow’s feature directorial debut originally encircled this idea, with a working title of September 17th, that date in Snow’s life when she chose to change her circumstances. “I think September is sometimes a hard concept for people because it has to do with me and my recovery, and I don’t really want to talk about that anymore,” she says.
Instead, Snow is choosing to explore that through her work, like September Letters and the movie September 17th would become, Parachute, which premiered at SXSW in March. Parachute follows Riley (Yellowjackets’ Courtney Eaton) after she’s released from inpatient care for an eating disorder and her struggles to reacclimate to life, including her feelings for a new person in her life, Ethan (Thomas Mann). “There’s people who are falling and people who are trying to catch them. And the people who are trying to catch them don’t always get a movie [made] about them. It’s just as much about his story as it is hers,” Snow says.
Directing was “therapeutic” for Snow because Parachute “is a story near and dear to my heart,” she says. “I never really set out to be a director. I just knew that I had a story to tell, and I didn’t want anyone else to tell it. I do think that now I’ve unlocked a part of me that I’m pretty attuned to and that I like.”
September Letters: Finding Strength and Connection in Sharing Our Stories
Parachute is confrontational and doesn’t shy away from showing the depths of body dysmorphia and eating disorders. Shondaland asked Snow how she toed the line between making sure Parachute wasn’t triggering, as with the letters she chooses for the September Letters website, and also making sure it was true to her experience.
“That was always at the forefront of our mind, more so than anything else that we discussed in terms of the prep of the movie, the writing, the shooting, and the press afterwards,” she says. “We worked really closely with the Alliance for Eating Disorders — it’s a mental health initiative and charity that we had talks with. They were sent the script, they gave notes, they were there pretty much every step of the way.”
That’s a concern Snow has when seeking wide distribution for Parachute too. “Having partners who are really specific and really passionate about the subject matter is really important to us.” Any hints as to when that will be? “Hopefully soon,” she says.
In the meantime, audiences curious about Snow’s work can check out the September Letters book. Snow points out that the two aren’t designed as companion pieces.
“I don’t want Parachute to feel like an after-school special to then go on the website,” she says. “I have other things to say; it just so happens that I’m very passionate about this.”
Scarlett Harris is a culture critic and author of A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment. You can follow her on Twitter @ScarlettEHarris.
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