Miranda July wants to send you personal e-mails straight from the mailbox of Kirsten Dunst, Lena Dunham, Catherine Opie, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Sheila Heti, Etgar Keret, Kate and Laura Mulleavy (of Rodarte), Lee Smolin and Danh Vo. Don't feel bad if you don't know all the names: there's a theoretical physicist in that list.

Quote from the artist: "I’m always trying to get my friends to forward me emails they’ve sent to other people — to their mom, their boyfriend, their agent — the more mundane the better. How they comport themselves in email is so intimate, almost obscene — a glimpse of them from their own point of view."

There will be 20 mails over a period of 20 weeks. Each mailing is themed. Yesterday, I got the first one in my mailbox. Its theme is 'an email about money'. Spoiler alert: Lena Dunham thinks 25 thousand dollars is too much for a couch. I'm sure she's heard this before, but yeah, I can totally relate to her writing. She also uses a smiley face (with one bracket as smiling lips) talking to her assistant. Feel free to analyze.

View fullsize

Here's Miranda July on strangers for 'The School of Life' lectures.

You can tell a lot about someone you don’t know from the contents of their wallet. There's also a lot that you can’t tell. Filmmaker, artist and writer Miranda July delivers a unique sermon that challenges our attitudes to strangers and asks us to be more adventurous and generous with how we interact with each other. Miranda July's videos, performances, and web-based projects have been presented at sites such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and in two Whitney Biennials. July wrote, directed and starred in her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know(2005), which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Camera d’Or. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker; her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You (Scribner, 2007), won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty countries. July created the participatory website, learningtoloveyoumore, with artist Harrell Fletcher and a companion book was published in 2007 (Prestel); the work is now in collection of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This event was part of The School of Life's secular sermon series and took place at Conway Hall London on Sunday 23 October.