Drawing on the queer-feminist work of Jane Gallop, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Maggie Nelson, this essay in two parts— which is epistolary in form and content—considers the reparative effects of writing a love letter to a dead woman writer; argues it to be a loving and sustaining form of feminist criticism: an example of what the author terms "close writing". The essay performs its critique by getting "close to" the lives, writings, and images of two US-American women writers associated with the New York Downtown scene of the 1970s and 1980s: Kathy Acker (1947–1997) and Cookie Mueller (1949–1989).