I met Kate in 1973. Since then she has written me many letters. Most of them are five to eight pages long, and include numerous annotations, notes, sketches, marginalia, and illuminations. Searching for a certain book in my attic the other day, I came across five grocery bags of her letters. Hundreds of letters, perhaps a thousand letters; accounts of her life over the decades, with particular reference to crazy romances, life in New York City, matters of health, and the tiny plural twists into which some notion of hers might explode. A treasury for which I am immensely grateful.
A mutual friend has described Kate as having more friends than anybody she knows, which suggests grocery bags speckled all over the world.
Kate has shifted chiefly to email, and I am assiduously archiving every bit she blesses to my inbox. I wish all her friends would copy me her electronic diaries.
Pepys!
The detailed private diary he kept during 1660–1669 was first published in the nineteenth century, and is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period. It provides a combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War and the Great Fire of London. (wik)
