When I was young and in a perpetual battle with my mother, I used to sometimes complain about her to my father, who certainly had his own troubles dealing with her. He suggested that writing down my thoughts might be of some help. I’m not sure now what sort of help he had in mind — immediate or long-term, pacifying or clarifying. Was he simply trying to shut me up or help me come to terms with a difficult and volatile person? I never found out whether he did any such writing of his own.
Whatever the intent, I took his advice, and often wrote down what was on my mind along with what was happening in my daily life. Some of that early writing is contained in a small dark brown leather-bound book marked “A Page a Day” in gold letters, a book that I wrote in at various intervals between the ages of 10 and 14. The book has a strap closing it with a little latch and a lock that once had a tiny key. (Such locks were quite easy to pick, even for amateur hackers like my 10-year-old self, and I remember sneaking peeks at my big sister’s similar book.)
The entries in my early diary are utterly conventional and often whiny, but also informative and occasionally poignant. They provide a sketchy record of events and people, some still well-remembered, some only dimly.
Early on, I find sentences about music lessons and recitals, outdoor games of basketball after school on the playground, the names of early friends and classmates. Later on, there are lots of yearning sentences about boys I wished would pay more attention to me, lots of watching other people — mostly boys, this was ancient history, remember — play team sports.
Subsequent journal entries, sporadically kept over many decades and mostly found in small spiral-bound notebooks, include other sorts of psychic drama, but also an attempt to pay more attention to the world around me. More recent still are accounts of travels, first kept to jog my memory about people and places I’ve encountered, and then as notes for possible pieces to share in print. In the past few years, I’ve recorded my observations in these travel notebooks in part to amuse my husband, who no longer joins me when I leave home.
Now comes the question: Why do we keep journals or diaries? Who do we think is going to be interested, aside from us? Those of us who think of ourselves as writers know that putting words on paper — or onto a computer — is a way of clarifying our thoughts. As someone famously said: I don’t know what I think until I write it down.
A few months ago, I spent some time with Virginia Woolf’s “A Writer’s Diary,” a wide-ranging collection of entries she made between 1918 and her death in 1941. Here, she considers the form itself:
What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art.
That seems like a wonderful fantasy, not to mention a wonderfully mixed metaphor — that the diary entries would somehow, without her having to do anything, form themselves into a work of art. I don’t believe my entries about outdoor basketball, quarrels with my mother, or early romantic miseries are likely to do that. Still, they do something else for me, exactly as Woolf claims for herself: “I got out this diary and read, as one always does read one’s own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.” Yes, guilty intensity just about describes it.
Marietta Pritchard can be reached at mppritchard@comcast.net.