Keeping a diary is hard. I’ve always been so jealous of people who carry around battered little books, jotting down thoughts and making themselves permanent in the world. In college, I had a friend who journaled in paper thin moleskines, burning through each of them in less than a month. She would decorate the simple brown covers with photographs, her own writing, pieces of her experiences from the weeks before. Instead of seeming like a juvenile scrapbook, I felt like if her thoughts were spread out like a physical map- with little mountains of fear and rivers of contentment.
To be able to chronicle my life in such a way that I leave an honest, unflinching imprint of myself behind is something I fear I’ll never be able to do. It’s something, in fact, that some people would rather never do. Zadie Smith, author of NW, wrote in a recent post for Rookie Mag that journaling was something she could never get the hang of, nor did she want to. She wrote, “I was never able to block from my mind a possible audience, and this ruined it for me”.
Flannery O’Connor seemed extremely self-aware when writing in her prayer journal, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her handwritten notebooks seem meticulously organized, with very few spelling mistakes or crossed-out sentences. I can’t help but wonder if she transcribed these journals from another, messier book. In the pages, she implores, “Please help me dear God to be a good writer”, and it feels like her journal is in fact the preparation for her future as a well-known artist. An insurance policy, as it were, something that needed to be well-done; because once she was famous, people would find it, and they wouldn’t be able to keep from reading its pages.
I’ve got to say, I have never once journaled without the thought of someone reading it after I’m gone. In high school, I was drowning in ALL THE FEELINGS, yet instead of keeping a journal, I wrote everything, all the excruciating details of my DEEPLY FELT FEELINGS in a blog. A blog, people. The antithisis of a secret diary. Maybe it says something about how self-absorbed my generation is, but maybe for some people, an audience is somehow necessary. Is it possible for a journal to be just as truthful and cathartic if the author knows that someone else will read it? And because I never kept a secret diary, I don’t have the answer.
There are several talented people, thankfully, who are up for the task of intimate, non-blog journaling. Sarah Manguso’s new book, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary chronicles her fear of forgetting, and her obsession with the passing of time. While not a diary itself, Ongoingness offers very poignant thoughts about the process of keeping a journal. Some around Manguso lauded her as committed and hard-working for keeping up with a diary, meticulously writing down every detail; while in reality, to her it sometimes felt like a vice. A diary wasn’t a way for her to unwind and contemplate the events of the day, it was a a place to write in a panicked, grasping gasps, never quite able to fit the realness of a day onto the pages.
“Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.”
Vice or laborious ball and chain? To each his own, I suppose, but it is clear in the abundance of published diaries that wrestling with the idea of how to document our short time on earth is nothing new. Guess it’s time for me to try a new format.
Written by Hannah
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