Email Newsletters Are a New Literary Genre

Christine Smallwood’s recent novel The Life of the Mind — a bleak, funny tour of academia’s outer fringe — offers a lament for the state of email. Dorothy, the book’s grad-student heroine, “used to love email, used to have long, meaningful, occasionally thrilling email correspondences that involved the testing of ideas and the exchange of videos and music links.” Emails had been the way Dorothy and her friends “crafted personas, narrated events, made sense of their lives,” Smallwood writes. “That way of life, alas, had ended.” Now the emails they exchange are perfunctory, businesslike, “and if you wanted to know what someone was doing, you could usually find out on social media.” Still, the craving for digital connection persists. “Dorothy had not stopped checking, expecting, or wishing that a good message might be out there, waiting in the ether just for her.”

Would it be a consolation to Dorothy to know that long emails aren’t quite dead? I now get emails that are longer than ever, in fact. They strain against the confines of Gmail, these emails; they demand to be opened in new tabs. The videos and links are still there, and often ideas, too. In no sense, however, are these emails “just for me.” These are emails composed for an audience not of one friend but of many fans. These emails are newsletters.

It happened this week — let’s talk about it. Sign up for My Week in New York: a new newsletter from the editors.