I wonder if anyone else has experienced this--you spend hours, days, weeks, months... reading the archived correspondence of your biographical subject as he goes through his life, inevitably aging and perhaps losing some of his inhibitions (if he ever had any) in the way he expresses himself.
Then you turn to write some emails and find, to your horror (or perhaps not really to your horror!), that you're writing in something very closely approximating his voice. Somehow you've absorbed his jaded, cantankerous style of writing (which might not be that far from how you're feeling anyway--after all, it's pretty easy to feel jaded and cantankerous these days, amirite?), and before you know it, you've hit the "Send" button, and a message goes out that makes you sound like someone who is tired of life and mad at the world.
Is Kerr doing that to me or are his letters just bringing to the surface what's already there?
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