ABSTRACT
The chapter deals with letter writing as a long-lasting dialogical life writing practice that needs to be approached via a focus on its textual features and its status as a set of materially embedded processes and activities. It is based on an epistolary corpus belonging to the family archive of the author, well suited for highlighting several topical issues in the study of letters and correspondences. These include the role of migrant correspondences in maintaining emotional bonds and kinship ties between family members that can be effectively observed by tracing different textual strategies of intimacy as well as questions of closeness and distance that also apply to the researcher as a family member.
