Personal Paper Prying

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At HTML Giant, Roxane Gay ponders our insatiable curiosity about the personal papers of famous writers, reflecting on the value of preservation versus privacy.

“Somewhere, there exists a random note written on a napkin by a writer who is not yet famous but someday will be. Even farther into the future, someone will study that napkin in a fancy library and assign all kinds of meaning to it. That is fascinating and terrifying and a little absurd.”

Lisa Dusenbery is the managing editor of The Rumpus. More from this author →