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This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.With the advent of new communication technologies such as email, text messages and omnipresent social media networks, digital epistolary novels and fanfiction of the early twenty-first century strive to reflect these digital communication methods. Epistolary fiction has traditionally interrogated how the representation and construction of the self through writing is complicated by the communication technology of the letter. Digital epistolary texts incorporating emails work to further complicate the link between self and text. I look at how two digital epistolary texts incorporate and reflect upon emails while at the same time examining the suitability of the romance plot, fanfiction and epistolary fiction for interrogating such questions: the romance novel Attachments (2011) by Rainbow Rowell and the fanfiction text ‘Apes Debemus Imitari (We Should Imitate the Bees)’ (2015) by buckysbees. These texts play out the fraught relationship between characters and their representation via mediated communication, each finding a different resolution in relation to the romance plot’s ‘happily ever after’.