On Conflagration: The Masks of Natalie Portman



In “On Conflagration: The Masks of Natalie Portman,” I compare Portman’s gratitude for a deleted history of emails to the turn-of-the-century trend of letter burning. The essay explores the form of the letter, Virginia Woolf’s notion of the “cotton wool” of daily life, the Jamesian inner world, Dior, Chekhov, Garden State, how we navigate identity in our youth, and the nature of celebrity.