Crazy Letters from Grandma

Over 1,200 letters. Thirty years of family scandals, unsolicited advice, and bathroom reports. One unforgettable grandmother.

No bowel movement, family feud, or small-town scandal should die undocumented.

That might as well have been Mary Lowry’s motto.

For more than thirty years, Grandma Lowry chronicled life in rural Indiana in over 1,200 letters to her second-oldest daughter’s family in Iowa. Nothing was too personal, too embarrassing, or too insignificant to write down. Neighbors misbehaved. Relatives feuded. Bodies betrayed their owners. And Grandma, armed with a pen and an opinion about everything, made sure somebody heard about it.

She was five feet tall and five feet wide, with cat-eye glasses, a laugh that could stop conversation, and a talent for saying precisely what everyone else was thinking but had the good sense to keep to themselves.

Her letters were funny, outrageous, occasionally exasperating, and always unmistakably hers.

But behind the complaints, gossip, and bathroom humor was a woman whose family meant everything to her—even when they were driving her out of her mind.

In Crazy Letters from Grandma, her grandson Craig Borchard brings those letters together with his own memories and the family stories that survived across the generations. The result is a humorous work of creative nonfiction that follows an unforgettable grandmother-grandson relationship from childhood mischief through adulthood, loss, and an unexpected inheritance: the stories themselves.

Along the way, the book offers practical jokes, small-town scandals, family secrets, and more than a few moments when Grandma probably should have kept her mouth shut.

Fortunately for the rest of us, she rarely did.