1. “Booking Number 2409756″ is fifty postcards I wrote for Lindsay Lohan.

2. Three weeks after my mom died of brain cancer in 2010, Lindsay Lohan was sentenced to 90 days in jail for violating probation related to a DUI conviction. She reported to serve the sentence two weeks later, and served 13 days. While Lindsay was in jail, she received approximately 250 letters a day. She could have up to ten in her cell at any time. Anything Lindsay didn’t get around to reading in a day, her mother and her sister took back to her house in large mailbags.

3. I thought about Lindsay a lot when she was in jail. I started writing postcard messages for her. It was something I could do, it required a type of effort I could make. It was concentrated and finite. It was like making looped potholders, or knitting socks. Writing postcards for Lindsay Lohan was one of the things that kept me from losing my mind.

4. I wrote some of the postcards when Lindsay was in jail. I kept writing them after she was freed. For a short while I thought about writing 250 postcards — a full day’s worth of mail. I got to 50 and realized that those 50 said everything that I wanted to say, so I stopped there.

5. I did not write the postcards in order. The order came later. Putting the postcards in order was as satisfying as clearing a board in Tetris, although it took considerably longer.

6. After I finished the postcards and had them in the right order, I didn’t know what to do with them. I fretted. I tried different versions, different approaches. For a while I thought the end result was wrong, that it needed to have a different form, a different focus. A good friend convinced me to leave them alone.

7. The only movies of Lindsay’s that I have seen are Freaky Friday and Get A Clue. I would like to see Life Size, because Tyra Banks is also in that one. If Tyra Banks ever went to jail, I would want to write postcards for her, too.

8. My favorite Lindsay Lohan story is the one where she trotted into some nightclub bathroom or other and announced to no one in particular, “Tonight I’m going to fuck Jude Law.”

9. I didn’t send Lindsay the postcards. When she’s back in jail, which has happened a couple of times since then, I think about it. But I’m in a slightly different place now, and I suspect Lindsay is too.

10. I don’t get asked to read my work very often. If I ever got asked to read from this, I would probably write out the last ten postcards in advance, read them aloud, and give them away to audience members one by one.