On Keeping a Diary - The Ladies Network June 2016

Your diary is where you keep the parts of yourself you’ve deemed unfit for public consumption. Mine is never brilliant or funny; it’s grammatically incorrect and the syntax is shocking. I swore to myself that I would never re-read what I’ve written over the past 17 years, but morbid curiosity recently got the better of me.

I flip through my year eight diary and cringe at the moments I took too seriously; I see myself at 17 when my emotions were entirely superfluous; I thought being 20 was thrilling but the written version of it is mediocre and ignorant.

Last month Lena Dunham released excerpts of her 2005-2006 diary and so accurately described the re-reading process. “There is something so pleasurably painful about reading old diaries,” she said, “like picking a scab or waiting for a sneeze or asking an ex to explain, in graphic detail, why they don’t want you anymore.”

Dunham made a bold move publishing her diaries. Yes, her writing is always personal but it’s always a very calculated kind of personal – there are drafts and editors. The thought of someone reading your diary is embarrassing enough, let alone voluntarily publishing them for thousands to read. It shows a very particular kind of bravery.

While the thought of someone reading my diary mortifies me, I jump at the chance to read someone else’s, like some kind of literary voyeur trying to catch a glimpse of someone’s secret life.

When I feel paralysed as a writer I turn to the diaries of other writers – Anaïs Nin, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf – as some kind of exercise in osmosis meant to inspire me.

There is something to be gained from reading about someone, somewhere who has felt the things you are feeling; who has figured out how to deal with life’s peculiarities, and has written it all down in a way that you never could.

By reading the diaries of successful writers, I catch a glimpse of their inner selves and their creative struggles. It’s reassuring to read just how many times Plath submitted to, and was rejected by, The New Yorker and how she dealt with it (spoiler: by reading Woolf’s diary to understand how shehandled rejection. So meta).

The thing about reading a writer’s diary in the hopes of absorbing their creativity is that with a feeling of great inspiration comes a feeling of great inferiority. These are not polished novels. These are the roughest of drafts; the most intimate of thoughts, never intended for strange eyes.

Nin began keeping a diary at 11 and continued up until her death at 74. She wrote a whopping 150 volumes equal to 15,000 pages of typed transcript. It’s a passionate, detailed and articulate record of a woman’s journey through the labyrinth of self-discovery.

“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments…I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace…I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.”

She is also a reminder that we must break away from the diary and live a life that is worth writing about. She came to rely on her journal too heavily as a confidant and a shield against the outside world.

On the advice of her mother, therapists Rene Allendy and Otto Rank, and writer Henry Miller she tried to wean herself off the diary, but ultimately couldn’t. “This diary is my kief, my hashish, and opium pipe,” she writes. “This is my drug and my vice.”

“The [journal is] only steadfast friend I have, the one which makes my life bearable, because my happiness with human beings is so precarious, my confiding moods rare, and the least sign of non-interest is enough to silence me. In the journal I am at ease.”

Like Anaïs, Plath started her diary at 11 and penned nearly 10 volumes before her suicide at 30. Plath’s journal was utilitarian – she used it to construct her life, incite her memory, and warm up her writing for more formal work – but it was also more than that. She called it “a litany of dreams, directives and imperatives.”

Her writing is raw and obsessive. She returns many times to express her sensitivity towards rejections from magazines, her resolutions to read and learn, and her attempts to ward off depression.

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want…I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

The thing that interests me the most about Plath is that, while I turn to her diary to see how she dealt with rejection, she turned to Woolf’s diary for the same remedy:

“Just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf…she works off her depression over rejections from Harper’s by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock & sausage. Bless her. I feel my life linked to her, somehow.”

Unlike Nin and Plath, Woolf didn’t start journaling with regular intensity until she was 33, so her insights are a little more mature, a little more sure. She filled 26 volumes before her suicide at 59.

For Woolf, a diary was a database for memories. Hers is also full of writing exercises, character profiles, and the ins and outs of her creative process.

“The habit of writing for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. I note however that this diary writing does not count as writing.”

There is something about the habit of keeping a diary that appeals to writers. It’s a way to explore, to build a bridge between past and future selves, to transcribe the basic elements of life that can be dipped into for material. While I have no intention of making my diary available to anyone else’s eyeballs, it brings me peace to know that these literary women have been through it all – for better or worse – and their advice is mine for the taking. These women write about themselves but there is some thread of the universe that ties them to all women past, present and future. Bless them. I feel my life linked to them, somehow.

This story originally appeared on The Ladies Network in June, 2016.
Main image: Lena Dunham as Hannah Horvath in ‘Girls’, 2012.