Loving Each Other Late
A memoir through letters
Loving
Each Other
A Daughter and Father Inching Toward Each Other after Fifty Years of Missing in Action
Erin Stephens and Tom Owen-Towle
His letters
His letters appear essentially as he wrote them: earnest, pastoral, quoting everyone from W. E. B. Du Bois to his college basketball coach.
Her answers
Her answers come back in a different key: dry where he is earnest, forensic where he is devotional, and funny the way people who survived their childhoods by being funny are funny.
Fridays
Every Friday they sit across a table from each other and read the week’s letters aloud. The repair happens there, one letter at a time.
Are you my family?
Am I yours?
“Did letters repair fifty years? No. The letters are where the repairing happens, and it is not done.”
From “Yes,” the closing essay
Erin Stephens
Erin is a forensic researcher who studies how people behave when they believe no one is watching. She holds an M.S. in criminal justice from Boston University and a B.A. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and is completing a Ph.D. in forensic cyberpsychology. She lives in Santa Barbara, California.
Tom Owen-Towle
A retired Unitarian Universalist minister, the Rev. Dr. Tom Owen-Towle is the author of twenty-six books on spiritual growth, social justice, and the practice of relationship. For the last sixty years, he has been preaching, teaching, singing, and building community. He is Erin’s father and the second voice of this correspondence.
The companion workbook
Reconciliation Without Erasure: A Workbook for the Estranged, the Strangers, and Everyone in Between. Exercises drawn from the book for the work that starts with you. Each one turns first toward yourself, and then, when you are ready, toward the person you love who has become a stranger.
© 2026 Erin Stephens and Tom Owen-Towle
“We remain unfinished animals.”