A charming drama laced with a touch of the whimsical, The Gryphon and the Greeting Card Writer follows three characters in search of themselves – and quite accidentally – each other. Entwined before they ever meet, the protagonists slip through their dark and somber world like eels through waving kelp, unconsciously destined to discover one another at the most important time in their lives.
An ad appears in the London Times: Wanted. Dad left. Mother is dying. She needs a good family for a ten-year-old-girl and her dog. Care, feeding, and housing required. Lifelong commitment. Only serious enquiries, please. Robin.
In his mid-thirties, Conrad, a quiet, sentient man, writes those touching greeting cards people muse over in the stores, the cards that say all the personal, special things they wish they could express themselves. With an innate penchant for capturing other peoples’ emotions, Conrad pens the sympathy cards, the sentimental birthday greetings, the Christmas wishes to a mother or father, and the emotional lines lovers send each other ‘just because.’ A modern Cyrano, he whispers words of love and hope for people he doesn’t know to the hearts of those he’ll never meet. But his world is incomplete — he needs a family more than anything. His perpetual sounding board, a talkative little parakeet, agrees. One day, Conrad inadvertently finds the young girl’s newspaper ad, and his entire world comes to a crashing stop.
Juxtaposed with Conrad’s story is the distressing tale of Megan, a lonely, abused young girl whose special gryphon tries to protect her from the ravages of an alcoholic father. Due to the terrible things she endures, Megan develops a psychological fixation on peoples’ faces. A passenger on a train that stops at endless stations of foster homes, Megan cuts faces away from magazines, rips them from books, and even tries to scratch them off television screens. As a young adult, her obsession helps her become a cosmetic wizard. She sublimates her feelings by working in a facility for dementia patients, where she uses her art to recreate peoples’ faces so they look like they did in the past, hoping it will help them remember the times they’ve forgotten.
In a bizarre twist of fate Megan finds the same advertisement that has affected Conrad so deeply. Together, Conrad, Megan and Robin become immersed in a desperate search for family, friendship, love, and ultimately, their own identity. Touched with a sense of the surreal, The Gryphon and the Greeting Card Writer explores that fragile space of time where love, hope, and destiny intersect with forever.
