ABSTRACT
During her lifetime, Susan Sontag sent 17,198 emails. Today they are kept in the Department of Special Collections at the Charles E. Young Research Library at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), where researchers can read them on a special laptop. The emails reveal the minutiae of her friendships, her appointments, and the small, forgotten details of everyday life. Sontag’s official biographer, Benjamin Moser, has written about the ‘queasiness’ he felt as he read them, ‘unease, sometimes verging on nausea’, as he was drawn into his subject’s sex life, her finances, medical records, failures, disappointments, and difficulties.1 Sontag’s email archive is stored on two small hard drives, each labelled with a Post-it note.
