On Writing and Reading Diaries

By Feargha DeCléir

Illustration by Isabella Mac Ghiolla Ri

The first time I read another woman’s diary, I felt as though I had gained some magical power - like mind reading, or shapeshifting. Before you judge me - no, I didn’t read the secret diary of a friend, stolen while they looked the other way. The diaries I’ve read were shared with permission, published by women writers who got to a certain age or standing and decided for reasons I can’t imagine to tear off the mask of their clever prose and publish long volumes of notes - starting in their teens, spanning their lives - unedited, hastily written, entirely bare. 

We live, so they say, in the golden age of memoir. And memoir is great. Memoir is a beautiful stranger, fully dressed and wearing shoes, who lets you into her apartment and points - there is the desk where I write, there is my lover smoking in my bed, there is my dirty laundry, there is the pie I baked for you, there is my childhood. 

A diary is something else entirely. 

If you saw someone on the bus wrinkle their nose and furrow their eyebrows in worry, and you were able to jump inside their mind and hear what that worry sounded like, it's refrain - that is a diary. 

And if a diary is banal, at first glance, perhaps that’s because we don’t quite know how to read it. These volumes don't tell a story, they don’t present anything to us, they don’t consider the reader at all - when they were written, the reader did not exist. 

So what we are left with is something literary and unliterary. Something between a poem and a stack of evidence at a crime scene. Fragments of women, their furrowed brows, a thought that passed through their heads on a quiet twentieth century Wednesday - that is what the diary holds. 

*

Susan Sontag’s first volume of published diary entries starts on the 23rd of November 1947. She writes: 

I believe:

(a) That there is no personal god or life after death

(b) That the most desirable thing in the world is freedom to be true to oneself, i.e.,

Honesty

(c) That the only difference between human beings is intelligence

(d) That the only criterion of an action is its ultimate effect on making the individual

happy or unhappy

(e) That it is wrong to deprive any man of life [Entries 'f' and 'g' are missing.]

(h) I believe, furthermore, that an ideal state (besides 'g') should be a strong

centralized one with government control of public utilities, banks, mines, +

transportation and subsidy of the arts, a comfortable minimum wage, support of

disabled and age[d].  State care of pregnant women with no distinction such as

legitimate + illegitimate children.

She was fourteen years old when she wrote that. When I was fourteen years old I also kept a diary, although (shock horror) it didn’t have much to say on the topic of the ideal state or defining the criteria of an action. 

What my fourteen year old diary does have in common with Sontag’s is an entire lack of biographical information. 

I remember once reading an old diary of my mother’s from around the same age. I cuddled up expecting something novel-esque, hoping to be transported to the past, complete with dialogue and description and a better knowledge of where I come from. Imagine my disappointment when it was mostly about boys, bands, and some stuff about how when she grew up she wanted to live in a commune. 

While memoir might reflect memories of an external world - those cinematic mid-century scenes I was hoping for - a diary is a record of the interior world. And the interior world of a fourteen year old is all about the definition of selfhood. 

That Sontag was defining herself through a honing of her beliefs, whereas I was fantasising about how cool I’d be when I finally worked out what to do with my hair, is beside the point. The teenage diaries ask: who am I? Who can I make myself? They do not tell a story, but instead paint a picture of a mind obsessed with identifying itself. A mind reaching to find her place in the world. What I have, and what Sontag had, is not a record of my fourteen year old life, but a record of my fourteen year old focus. When I read them, and line up the entries with what I knew to be happening in my life at the same time, what is omitted from the diary is as interesting (if not more interesting) than what is mentioned.

* 

Early this autumn I complained to my therapist that my diary had been reduced to a series of to-do lists. She did not seem to grasp the seriousness of this affliction. I had seemed to misplace myself, and as usual, went to find myself in the pages of a notebook - only to find that there was nobody there.

If a diary is an interaction with life, a space for reflecting and revelling and processing - my diary was burned out. It was a scramble in the dark for order, for control. If diarists are people who need to write things down in order to understand them, I had given up on understanding my life and my problems. Instead, I was searching for a way out. 

The to-do lists named actual things I had to-do (go to the dentists for the first time since, oh god, before the pandemic) but also long-shot things to put life right again: 

start getting up each day at 7 to meditate, 

look into medication, 

make a spotify playlist to cry to, 

quit drinking… 

What I was trying to tell my therapist, in brief, was that I had ceased to be a character in my own diary. Whereas once it was a deeply personal, reflective thing, it had now become somehow both pragmatic and delusional, and devoid of catharsis. As someone who has kept a diary her whole life, I couldn’t make sense of this book of lists. If I was not writing about my life, was I living it? Had I just become a human list?

Around the same time, I was aiming to rediscover my joie de vivre by tapping into the poetry of the everyday. The poetry of the everyday asks us to appreciate the things that perhaps we don’t see as beautiful or spectacular because they are not done for pleasure’s sake - they are done for survival. The commute to work, standing on exhausted feet in a queue in Lidl. I was also interested in mingei, a movement pioneered in the mid-1920s in Japan by Yanagi Sōetsu. Sōetsu was interested in the beauty found in utilitarian, everyday objects, rejecting the idea that some objects were solely functional whereas others were ‘art’ and therefore ‘beautiful.’

I started to wonder if a diary of to-do lists wasn’t a little mingei. If something is written not to express or to make grand statements about the soul, but instead to clear the head or even just check off tasks - does it not nevertheless have a little piece of the human spirit in it? Is it possible that it tells us more about where we’re at and who we are than a frank confessional essay ever could?

Most people, when asked about the benefit of journaling, will tell you that it’s about self expression or self discovery. But that’s not necessarily true. Poetry, prose, song writing - these can all be confessional. And when they are confessional (I’ve noticed, as a former teen songwriter,) they tend to get to the point much quicker.

When I was seventeen, I wrote a song about feeling insecure in a romantic relationship because of my disability. The chorus went: 

I’m worried I'll get dizzy when you speak. 

I’m worried I'll be too tired to dance with you in the street. 

I’m worried I'll need to sit down when I should be spinning you around. 

If I'm not standing up, how can I not let you down? 

The journals I wrote at the same time I was writing those songs take a rather different tone. 

One day, I am so full of energy and delight that I doubt I'm sick at all - I write a long entry about summer plans that I, reading back, know were completely unrealistic (hiking, dancing, daily activity - none of which I could do).

In the next day’s entry, I have a reality check, a moment of existential horror, and then quickly distract myself by writing something else entirely.  

In my songs I am frank about the situation. A poem, song or essay (all of which I suppose could be called memoir) are clear. They know what they are trying to tell you. This was where I was and this was how it felt. But the main character of our diaries is, so often, our own bewilderment. We don’t know where we are and we don’t know how it feels. We have lost the plot of our own life, we cannot follow it anymore, and we’re not sure we believe in the protagonist. 

In Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, which is a political as well as medical memoir, she includes sections of her real diaries from her treatment, as well as essays and prose written after the fact.

In the memoir sections, she writes: ‘I have learned much in the 18 months since my mastectomy… Now I wish to give form with honesty and precision to the pain, faith, labor and loving which this period of my life has translated into strength for me.’

This is how memoir works, a chain of cause and effect. A story in which A leads to B (in this case, cancer leads to transformation), and often, a story in which the individuals’ experience can teach us something about our society, our collective condition.

Memoir teaches us about life, but it also teaches us to see our lives as stories. They borrow their structure from the novel and the essay, in which form dictates causality, characters are plausible, and time is linear. 

The inclusion of her diaries interrupts the possible neatness of Lorde’s prose, bringing lived reality into focus. 

1/26/79 

I'm not feeling very hopeful these days, about selfhood or anything else. I handle the outward motions of each day while pain fills me like a puspocket and every touch threatens to breach the taut membrane that keeps it from flowing through and poisoning my whole existence. Sometimes despair sweeps across my consciousness like luna winds across a barren moonscape. Ironshod horses rage back and forth over every nerve. Oh Seboulisa ma, help me remember what I have paid so much to learn. I could die of difference, or live—myriad selves.

Those terrible years which we all face eventually, in one form or another, that ultimately transform us - they don’t appear as they do in memoir, as a sort of montage. It takes two seconds to write or read ‘I spent two years violently ill” but two entire years to live that sentence. The quality of those years, and how the mind endures them - that is the unexplored treasure of the diary. 

But let’s get into the juicy stuff.

Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux has published two volumes centring on the period she spent locked in a passionate affair with a Russian diplomat. The first, A Simple Passion, is a novel/memoir. The second, Getting Lost, which was published recently, is her diary from the same time. Her memoir is a portrait of passion, told intelligently and analytically, but the diaries are a primary source, a snapshot of the mind addicted to love.

It’s similar to the difference between Anais Nin’s A Spy in the House of Love and her diaries, both of which were ground-breaking accounts of female infidelity, double lives, and the pursuit of freedom.

While the novels centre lust as a delicious recipe for a page-turner, the diaries are the opposite. In narrativized love, the passion drives the book’s rhythm, makes it speedy and full of action - whereas love in a diary is repetitive, endless. It feels as though nothing moves forward, we go in circles, the same thing is said again and again. 

In A Simple Passion, Ernaux shows with immense talent the depth of her obsession. But it is only through living the monotony of that obsession in Getting Lost that we can understand exactly why it was so maddening, why she suffered so much from it. In any diary, there is repetition. It is why a diary makes such ‘bad’ literature in the typical sense, but such intimate reading. What is suffering, what is love, if not a single thought that we cannot remove from our mind?

In December 1948, Sontag read her own journal and wrote in despair:

I read again these notebooks. How dreary and monotonous they are! Can I never

escape this interminable mourning for myself? My whole being seems tense —

expectant ...

This is the paradox of published diaries. While you’ll find quotes from them on every corner of the internet, they are rarely heralded in their entirety as ‘a good read’ and that's because, basically, they’re kind of dull. Any book writing advice will tell you that in order for your work to be engaging, there must be a plot, something the reader is reading to find out, something that hooks them. A diary falls down on this first premise. It is not written for the consumption of entertainment of others, it is not written to be coherent or atmospheric or communicative - and it shows. 

So why do I read them? Why do so many of us tear through Henry and June or Consciousness hardened to flesh with such obsession? I think it’s more than sheer nosiness.

For me, to hear someone’s thoughts, their attempts to make sense of themselves, is to see some common humanity that can only be hinted at in other works. Its boringness is what makes it wonderful, a sort of cognitive mingei. 

Just as there is beauty in the utilitarian bowl, or in the morning commute - there is beauty too in the ordinary thoughts we have day to day. Someday, maybe we’ll tell the story in the past tense, and it will all seem very clear, and we’ll know when to ramp up the suspense and where to pause for laughter. But here, in the thick of life, we have our consciousness to keep us company. We have the worries that cast shadows over us in the club bathroom, the idle wandering, the happy memory, the excitement, the daydream, the passion. 

I do not read diaries to learn about the lives of others. I read diaries to bask in the ordinariness of our thoughts, amplified and reflected through a stranger. Showing us that something we hadn’t even noticed about ourselves is tangible, universal, and has its own kind of beauty.