Keeping a Diary
The tremendous value of a well-examined life
My first child, a girl, was born at 2.14 a.m. one joyful May morning. At 4 a.m., I was finally given the cup of tea I craved, and at 6, when my daughter was in the nursery and her father had gone home to make phone calls, the nurses instructed me to get some sleep. Instead, I dug a new pale mauve French notebook out of my overnight bag and began to write. I scribbled about the whole spellbinding experience for an hour. Because that is what I do.
It’s like a pressure build-up, that’s the only way I can describe the need to chronicle. In the past, the cause could sometimes be extreme, like childbirth or fury or grief or the heartbreak and euphoria of love; most of those not for quite some time, thank heavens. More recently, it can simply be an event to examine or an idea to mull over. When something hits, I deal with it by writing it down. I am a person who needs to transfer life experience from gut, through brain, down the arm to paper. For nearly fifty years, to a diary.
I started keeping a sporadic but constant journal in 1959 at the age of nine, with a gold lamé one-year diary with tiny lock and key. There was no set routine. Long periods, months, went by when I didn’t write at all, and sometimes, during especially fraught times, I wrote several times a day. If I want to find out where I was at almost any time through the span of my life, I can dig through and find out; it’s all there. My past is stored in dusty boxes under the bed.
And other people’s pasts too, since my family and friends — and lovers and enemies — are also chronicled. I sometimes go to anniversaries or birthday parties carrying an amusing excerpt about someone else.
I’ve paid a price for my diaries. People who live with a diarist know that private words are concealed somewhere in the house and sometimes hunt for and read them. A few in my life have been hurt by what they’ve read, and I’ve been hurt by their pain and anger. I learned to be careful where I store the things. There’s even a clause in my will about dealing with the diaries after my death; my kids can make a giant bonfire in the backyard and dance around the burning pyre, or they can publish them, the chronicles of a well-examined life. I won’t care about my diaries after I’m dead. Their job is done.
People wonder why I need them. Aren’t you so busy writing, they say, you’re not actually living? Don’t hang onto the past, don’t dwell; let things go and move on! In most lives, after a momentous event, happy or sad, frightening or wondrous, the impulse is to register it and, yes, move on. Perhaps tell a trusted friend, or write an email or call a family member, and then move on. And then there are diarists. Moving on is not something we do. We live our lives like everyone else, and then we live it all again, on paper.
Or online. In 2007, I started a blog. Only rarely, since then, have I written something just for my eyes alone. Mostly now I share my thoughts and experiences with whoever reads the blog — my public diary.
Why do diaries and now blogs matter? They bring comfort and sanity, thoughtfulness, truth, therapy, companionship, insight, friendship. They mean taking time to ponder, process, remember. We diarists make sense of life by keeping track. As events go whipping by, we can hang on, slow time a bit by taking note. I continue to chronicle because I don’t know how to live any other way. I cannot take a trip without recounting it. I cannot go through a life-changing or even just an interesting experience without noting it. A businessman friend told me he has written in his journal every night since he was nineteen. “I need to feel my life has some meaning,” he said. “That makes sense to me, all those binders, side by side.”
Yes, diaries can spring from pain. Lonely or isolated children, or adults who’ve suffered, are more likely to need to figure things out than those who are busy playing soccer or bridge. And thank God for that introspection, as many of our great writers started as lonely children with a pencil and paper. Now, science has proven that keeping track of experiences and thoughts is good for our psychological and even physical health. I think it’s a lucky family that has a chronicler, the person with the travel notebook, the letter writer, the family eulogist, someone who keeps the family stories and most likely the family photographs and mementoes as well.
I used to envy Carol Shields, the rare female author who managed to have a good long-term marriage, a big family, and a very successful writing career — a trifecta that did not work out for me. Then I read an interview with her, in which she said the one thing she regretted most in her life was that she’d never kept a diary.
One for the win over here, my friends.
I never understood why I’ve had this particular writing bug since childhood, until one day my mother gave me a thick envelope. “Thought you of all people would appreciate these,” she said. Inside were stacks of small notebooks that turned out to be the travel diaries of both my grandfathers. My English grandfather recorded all his trips in meticulous detail, starting with his visit to us when I was a year old, during which my father contracted polio and nearly died, an event barely mentioned in his pages. My American grandfather wrote about an exotic tour through Europe with his new girlfriend after my grandmother’s death. Best of all was an impressive journal my father kept of a work trip to China — his contacts and speeches, the sights he was seeing, the food he was eating, the books he was reading.
So it’s a gene, I think — the diary-writing gene. My daughter, the girl whose birth I wrote about, is too busy to chronicle and in any case, doesn’t have an introspective bone in her body. My son, on the other hand, figures things out in notebooks. He has inherited the gene.
Here’s a diary excerpt from 1964, when I was a florid fourteen:
I want to be a Writer. I want to be able to put down, on paper, new and breathtaking thoughts. I want my reader to be captivated in the spell my words are weaving, that won’t leave him until he’s finished devouring my book. I want the world to quietly salute me, eyes blinded with tears as the truth of my words stings! Or the beauty of my words touches! Or even as the simplicity of my words enchants!
But I don’t have an original thought in my frivolous head. My world is too dominated by the Others, whose judgement I fear. Will I ever have a beautiful, simple or even truthful thought? I doubt it – even if I became a hermit, I would be afraid of something. I’m a moral and social coward. I could maybe write fanciful, sex-filled love stories, that only sex-starved schoolgirls (like myself) could enjoy.
Oh, will my dream ever come true?
My love, this is your writer self answering you, sixty years later. It’s not quite how you envisioned it, but yes. Yes, your dream came true.
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When I taught in a high school I used to buy blank journals at my own expense and covertly give them to students whom I intuited would benefit from them. I seemed to have a sixth sense for who the writers were, even without concrete evidence. They sometimes weren't obvious choices at all; they could be quiet, showing little interest in literature; sometimes they weren't very good students, and most suprisingly, often no one had ever told them they were writers before. I told them to write whatever and whenever they wished and to show it to no one, not even to me, if they so chose. The mere act of gifting them with a notebook conferred a special grace, evidently, and in decades of playing Johnny Appleseed with blank journals I was rarely disappointed in the results, which manifested in wondrous ways.
Beautifully expressed as always, Beth. I too began writing a daily journal at age 17. It fell off after giving birth 12 years later. I simply did not have the time when all I could manage was a shower, a meal standing up, and one newspaper article between sleep, diaper changes and feedings. Although I returned to journaling when my days calmed down, the richest lode was those fervently felt pre-offspring days. Years later when I joined your creative writing memoir class at the UofT, I returned to that journal and extracted gems, much like your own 14 year old self's, to tease into a full blown memoir chapter. A book, in process, emerged. Who knew? I have so much fun reading my teen self. In later years, I saved myself a ton of therapy by flipping back to entries filled with angst, then flipping forward to sunny days. All passes. That's the lesson I learnt from my diaries.