The recounting of a life in the form of a letter may go all the way back to Benjamin Franklin, but it’s currently seeing a revival, kicked off by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and carried by major works by Imani Perry, Terese Marie Mailhot, Ocean Vuong, and others. “The new epistolary memoirs, however,” writes Parul Sehgal, “are less interested in stitching a life into a tidy narrative shroud than in ripping it from its seams.” – The New York Times