1 “It was as if I had taken root in this beautiful life of letters” (my trans.).

2 “Epistolary genre: genre of style exclusively reserved for women” (my trans.).

3 Echoing Vuong 3.

4 Harnessing the power of personal connection and memory over technology, Helga Thorson made short shrift of this mystery, immediately recalling the name Peggy Conant. The Internet subsequently provided me with the information that my P. Conant works at MIT and graduated from UMass Amherst with a BA in Women’s Studies and German in the mid-1980s.

5 “In the spring, we will take our sticks and hike, as if we were hermits, and we won’t say we are girls. You will have to make yourself a fake beard because you are tall, and otherwise nobody will believe it, but only a small one that looks good on you, and because I am small, I will be your little brother, but I will have to cut my hair. — Such a trip, we will take in the spring… ” (my trans.).

6 I thank Sally Ball, David Anderson, and Sigrid Anderson for granting me permission to reproduce the text of their emails.

7 “I am thinking of you./What does ‘thinking of you’ mean? It means: forgetting ‘you’ (without forgetting, life itself is not possible) and frequently waking out of that forgetfulness. Many things, by association, bring you back into my discourse. ‘Thinking of you’ means precisely this metonymy. For, in itself, such thinking is blank: I do not think you; I simply make you recur (to the very degree that I forget you). It is this form (this rhythm) which I call ‘thought’: I have nothing to tell you, save that it is to you that I tell this nothing” (Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse 157).

8 Echoing Vuong 3.