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.
