A Conversation with the Archivist Who Reads Other People's Mail
On the ethics and the strange intimacy of a career spent in other people's correspondence.
She has read thousands of strangers' letters for a living, and says the job taught her more about privacy by violating it than any principle ever could.
Her job, formally, is processing donated personal papers for a regional archive - which in practice means reading, cataloguing, and occasionally redacting decades of other people's private correspondence.
I asked whether the work ever felt like an intrusion. She said constantly, and that the discomfort never fully goes away, and that she has come to think the discomfort is actually doing something useful - keeping her honest about what she is allowed to share and what she is not.
The letters she remembers best, she said, are never the dramatic ones. They are the boring ones, the grocery lists and appointment reminders, because those are the ones that prove a person actually lived an ordinary life, which is the thing the archive is really for.
