YMMV / Letters From Cicely

• Hilarious in Hindsight: A few events in the book become more amusing after the release of subsequent seasons of the series in the years following the release of this book.
  • Shelly plays Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls and, inspired by Adelaide's song about developing a psychosomatic cold from her lover refusing to marry her, makes a fake cough at Holling in one scene. In the show, she starts having real psychosomatic medical problems (hallucinations of dancers) prompted by her stress about being unmarried.
  • Shelly performing in a musical becomes funnier after she starts singing like a musical character instead of talking as an unusual side effect of her pregnancy in the season 4 finale (and worries that she is only a good singer when she has that condition).
  • Maggie has a bad relationship with a man named Michael in this book, and her best relationship yet is with a different Mike in season 4.
  • In this book, Shelly gets caught up in a chain letter and involves the whole town in the chain, while a season 6 episode has her obsessing over what effect chain letters have on your life.
  • The disastrous direction Maurice's staging of Guys and Dolls goes from the start becomes funnier when, in season 6, he recalls how a production of Oklahoma! he tried to stage in the town never got off the ground and that he isn't sure the townspeople have it in them to successfully appear in a play.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Marilyn never writes to her circus performer ex-lover Enrico and Maurice never writes to his illegitimate son Duk Won, when both of those letters could have been colorful and emotional, especially given how stoic Marilyn usually is.
  • It can be a little disappointing that the book only shows letters written from Cicely and not the replies to those letters from people outside of town, which could have given interesting perspectives like those of Joel's parents, Maggie's brother, Ruth-Anne's sons, the celebrities Ed writes rambling letters to, and Shelly's friend Cyndy.