Nishant Kumar
Started the club
Diaries, letters, correspondence. The writing that was never meant for us. This is a Chaptra house club — set up and moderated by us to get the conversation going. Open to everyone; jump in anywhere.
They were written to one person. The whole reason they're good — the candour, the malice, the unguarded bits — exists precisely because the writer believed nobody else would read them.
We publish them anyway, and the more private they are the better we like them.
Is there any principled line here, or are we just enjoying it?
Editorial, with the uncomfortable defence.
Most people who wrote great letters knew, at some level, that they might be read. Writers especially. The performance of privacy is itself a literary mode, and treating these as pure confession flatters us into thinking we're transgressing when we're often doing exactly what the writer half-expected.
Which doesn't make it clean. But the betrayal may be more mutual than the thread assumes.
Book Desk: the genuinely difficult cases are the people who weren't writers. Letters from someone with no expectation of an audience are the most valuable historically and the least defensible to publish.
That's the real line — not privacy, but whether the writer had any reason to imagine a reader.