Loved this. I feel the same way about diaries. They have such great insight into a writer’s thoughts at particular moments. I love David Sedaris’ for example. But are that many people keeping diaries anymore? I suppose in 30 years when authors pass away we’ll get posthumous releases of all their substack articles and collections of their tweets
I love reading writers' letters to each other because there's little bit of flex in them, sometimes legitimate admiration, often a lot of envy, and a good deal of unspoken acknowledgement. Groucho Marx has some good ones, particularly to T. S. Eliot. I too have wondered if today's writers are saving their digital correspondence!
I share similar grandiose thoughts! Letter-writing feels like the perfect balance of personal and public, a sharing of heart intended for a particular person, as opposed to a diary that is written for an unspecified audience or to one's self. I just wrote a letter to my grandparents and I know they appreciate the form. Emails are the next closest thing. How fascinating that would be to have a collection of emails from one's favourite author of the last couple of decades. Would the book title be quite as elegant? "The emails of Jane Austen" would certainly have been an interesting thing to read. Thank you for sharing these thoughts!
In my opinion, the urge to 'clean up' Dahl is to prevent more young kids, which are his audience, from adopting Dahl's thoughts/attitudes as their own. "If he thinks that way, it must be the right way", etc. It's a slippery slope, but if the Dahl Foundation is in favor, just like the Seuss Foundation decided not to release certain books, that is their option. Private letters are a different category, imo, as they weren't written for the public view and thus more exposing. You really have to search them out.
Have you read Svetlana Alliluyeva's Twenty Letters to a Friend? It’s one of the more gently insightful collections I’ve read.
No but I'll check it out. Thanks!
Probably the most famous Soviet defector: Stalin’s Daughter https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1967/11/twenty-letters-to-a-father/303396/
Loved this. I feel the same way about diaries. They have such great insight into a writer’s thoughts at particular moments. I love David Sedaris’ for example. But are that many people keeping diaries anymore? I suppose in 30 years when authors pass away we’ll get posthumous releases of all their substack articles and collections of their tweets
I love reading writers' letters to each other because there's little bit of flex in them, sometimes legitimate admiration, often a lot of envy, and a good deal of unspoken acknowledgement. Groucho Marx has some good ones, particularly to T. S. Eliot. I too have wondered if today's writers are saving their digital correspondence!
Had to share this on the shoutout thread. Thanks for writing! This is great. And now, I have yet another book I need to read
I share similar grandiose thoughts! Letter-writing feels like the perfect balance of personal and public, a sharing of heart intended for a particular person, as opposed to a diary that is written for an unspecified audience or to one's self. I just wrote a letter to my grandparents and I know they appreciate the form. Emails are the next closest thing. How fascinating that would be to have a collection of emails from one's favourite author of the last couple of decades. Would the book title be quite as elegant? "The emails of Jane Austen" would certainly have been an interesting thing to read. Thank you for sharing these thoughts!
In my opinion, the urge to 'clean up' Dahl is to prevent more young kids, which are his audience, from adopting Dahl's thoughts/attitudes as their own. "If he thinks that way, it must be the right way", etc. It's a slippery slope, but if the Dahl Foundation is in favor, just like the Seuss Foundation decided not to release certain books, that is their option. Private letters are a different category, imo, as they weren't written for the public view and thus more exposing. You really have to search them out.