The particular person in these pages was younger, willful, typically petty and painfully positive of herself. And to simply accept her — my — flaws felt a bit like an act of resistance to the strain I’m nicely acquainted with as a girl to not have any flaws in any respect.
I really like revealed diary. I maintain Virginia Woolf’s “A Author’s Diary” and Anne Truitt’s “Flip” and “Daybook” on my desk and attain for them when in want of clever counsel. Studying about their interior lives helps me to make sense of my very own. Woolf had been a sporadic diary keeper who didn’t intend for her private writing to be revealed. Her husband, Leonard, edited them for publication after her demise. Truitt, a well-regarded sculptor, revealed “Flip” and “Daybook” throughout her lifetime, and a remaining quantity, “Yield,” was introduced out by her household after her demise. These diaries are thought-about as integral part of her legacy because the large-scale works she left behind.
When Joan Didion’s upcoming “Notes to John,” a diary consisting of 49 entries, which she stored in a submitting cupboard, comes out in April, I’ll tear by way of it, little question, the second I’m capable of get my fingers on it. It’s being described by its writer (additionally mine) as an intimate, unedited collection of entries, many written after periods along with her psychiatrist, all addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in 1999, 4 years earlier than he died.
Ms. Didion had a few years to determine what to do with that diary. She would have identified how we’d be, how badly we’d need extra. Would she, who penned the road “I feel we’re nicely suggested to maintain on nodding phrases with the individuals we was, whether or not we discover them engaging firm or not,” need the world to be on greater than nodding phrases with what I assume is a uncooked, maybe unattractive self she had filed away? Or would she merely not have cared? Maybe she would have mentioned, ever the cool buyer, “I’m useless, have at it. It’s now not any of my enterprise.”
We’ll by no means know. However maybe it’s within the very act of maintaining a diary — “maintain” being the operative phrase — that we keep on nodding phrases with all our selves, somewhat than neatly excising the gnarly or embarrassing bits. That we personal our flawed, messy narrative somewhat than burning it, shredding it, throwing it away. That we perceive that we aren’t outlined by one chapter or mistake or silly method of being. Whether or not we encounter our personal long-ago phrases, or our youngsters do, or our grandchildren, or a world of rapt strangers, maybe it’s on this dialogue of 1 — unpolished, uncooked, with out self-discipline — that we provide testimony into the void. That we are saying, that is me. I used to be human. And so are you.
