On a cold afternoon last February, I stood in my backyard in Connecticut in front of a fire pit. On a stone wall beside the blaze, I had stacked a pile of journals and diaries. Some were cloth-covered books that had accompanied me from grade school through college. A couple of them had flimsy locks, their tiny useless keys abandoned in junk drawers past. Many later diaries were housed in cardboard boxes, the blank paper they once contained dense with single-spaced, dated entries that I had taken the trouble to print out. One by one, I started feeding pages into the flames.
A few days earlier, I had been diagnosed with a rare malignant tumor in the back of my eye, and I was in the limbo between surgery and radiation. I did not yet know that this thing was not likely to kill me. It was not the first time the thought of death had merged with the thought of the journals. Over the years, when I had been on particularly turbulent flights, feeling a jet shudder and bounce, flight attendants strapped into their jump seats projecting calm, my terrified mind would inevitably leap to the third shelf in my office closet. My journals! Why had I kept them? Why, if, as I was certain, I never wanted a soul to read them?
My husband looked on warily as I opened one box labeled 1990, the year I was 28, about to publish my first novel and on the cusp of entering a short-lived marriage. (My second!) Yeah, 1990 was as good a place as any to start.
I watched pages turn to ash. Initially, this was satisfying. What was I doing? I thought I knew. None of us ever plan on dying, not really, or at least not soon. In a time of experiencing a profound loss of control in the form of the tumor that was blurring my vision, this felt like a consummate act of taking back my life, or at least my story. As the author of multiple memoirs, I was accustomed to controlling my own narrative. People would often tell me they knew everything about me. “You didn’t read my diary,” I’d joke. “If you had, I’d have to kill you.”
I had always thought of my diaries as garbage cans into which I tossed all the detritus: the obsessions, petty jealousies, fantasies, secret crushes, stinging rejections, all to clear the path to my “real” work, which is to say the attempt to make meaning and even beauty out of the chaos of being human. Memoirs are crafted, edited stories, no matter how close to the bone. The decision to include or leave out certain details or scenes or even characters are strategic literary ones. What serves the story? Whereas diaries are, at least initially, dumping grounds. And yet dumping grounds can yield the most fertile soil.
I grabbed more pages from the 1990 box, but before I had a chance to incinerate them, a few sentences caught my attention. I was writing about what it had been like for me as a young writer in New York just starting out. “My agent thinks this draft is really there. When I asked her about breakout potential, though, she said she thought it would be a tough book to break out with because it’s ‘serious and sad.’ But on the other hand, it’s ‘accessible, moves fast, is titillating and sexy.’ In other words, who knows.”
There was so much I had forgotten. So many names and places: editors, publishers, other writers, journalists, restaurants, bars, book parties, an entire world of lost relics I was about to set aflame. I dug deeper into that same box and met my 28-year-old self about to enter a marriage that checked all the boxes but could not have been more wrong for my soul. “Dinner with some of P’s colleagues. Felt like window dressing. Bored to tears … ‘You and your friends think you’re Bloomsbury, but you’re not,’ he yelled at me.” (The marriage lasted a year.)
I stopped feeding more pages into the fire after making acquaintance with the self who wrote them. It felt like killing her somehow, to destroy evidence of who she had been. Maybe she still had things to teach me. Despite her youth, she was more eloquent and self-aware than I had remembered.
I returned the boxes and journals to the third shelf of my office closet, where they sit today, haunting me with the question of what will become of them when I am no longer here. Should I leave instructions? Put them in a safe deposit box? Comb through them (the thought makes me want to take a nap) for the bits that might be worth preserving? As of this writing, I am still on the fence. Something’s telling me that I’m not ready to let go of them.
The person in these pages was young, willful, sometimes petty and painfully sure of herself. And to accept her — my — flaws felt a little like an act of resistance to the pressure I’m well acquainted with as a woman not to have any flaws at all.
I love a good published diary. I keep Virginia Woolf’s “A Writer’s Diary” and Anne Truitt’s “Turn” and “Daybook” on my desk and reach for them when in need of wise counsel. Reading about their inner lives helps me to make sense of my own. Woolf had been a sporadic diary keeper who did not intend for her personal writing to be published. Her husband, Leonard, edited them for publication after her death. Truitt, a well-regarded sculptor, published “Turn” and “Daybook” during her lifetime, and a final volume, “Yield,” was brought out by her family after her death. These diaries are considered as integral a part of her legacy as the large-scale works she left behind.
When Joan Didion’s upcoming “Notes to John,” a diary consisting of 49 entries, which she kept in a filing cabinet, comes out in April, I will tear through it, no doubt, the moment I’m able to get my hands on it. It’s being described by its publisher (also mine) as an intimate, unedited series of entries, many written after sessions with her psychiatrist, all addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in 1999, four years before he died.
Ms. Didion had many years to decide what to do with that diary. She would have known how interested we would be, how badly we’d want more. Would she, who penned the line “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” want the world to be on more than nodding terms with what I assume is a raw, perhaps unattractive self she had filed away? Or would she simply not have cared? Perhaps she would have said, ever the cool customer, “I’m dead, have at it. It’s no longer any of my business.”
We’ll never know. But perhaps it’s in the very act of keeping a diary — “keep” being the operative word — that we stay on nodding terms with all our selves, rather than neatly excising the gnarly or embarrassing bits. That we own our flawed, messy narrative rather than burning it, shredding it, throwing it away. That we understand that we aren’t defined by one chapter or mistake or foolish way of being. Whether we encounter our own long-ago words, or our children do, or our grandchildren, or a world of rapt strangers, perhaps it is in this dialogue of one — unpolished, raw, without discipline — that we offer testimony into the void. That we say, this is me. I was human. And so are you.
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