The Pleasure and the Pointlessness of Diary-Writing
Three years ago, I was reading Helen Garner’s diaries, the first volume of which holds eight years of observations. I could do that, I thought. I should do that. Certain books should carry a disclaimer to not try this at home.
I wasn’t motivated to create a body that I might someday publish. It only seemed logical: if I want to call myself a writer, I should write, and every day at that. A novelist should keep a diary, much as an athlete should stretch. I had tried, and failed, to keep one before. But this time would be different!
In some impulse to self-improvement — it was that aimless interregnum between Christmas and the New Year — I bought a notebook, tended to it daily. “I’m sick of eating Christmas cookies,” I wrote. “Winter is horrible,” I wrote. I noted what my kids were doing, what I was reading, the day’s annoyances. This last proved especially fertile. I’m no Helen Garner (who among us is?), just a fusspot with complaints. I’ve kept up with this almost New Year’s Resolution ever since, filling four notebooks.
Recently, as I prepared to downsize from a small-ish house to a smaller-ish apartment (ie, threw things away), I found a box of my old, abortive attempts at keeping a diary. It was sobering; I’d no idea I’d failed at this endeavour quite so many times. I do not have a consistent documentation of my whole life, but I’ve accrued a significant paper trail.
When I was six years old, I recorded my thoughts in a small appointment book swiped from my mother’s office. “My teacher’s name is Mrs Piper,” I wrote. “My brother is in the band,” I wrote. “He is nice.” “I have a baby brother,” I wrote. I’m charmed by my childish impulse, but my youthful writing pales in comparison to that of my own children from around this age. “One day I was at dinner and my idiot brother was running his mouth like always and he keeps saying I’m Mona Leasea Roca Roca,” my older son scribbled in one of his school books. An entry worthy of Helen Garner! I didn’t throw this away when we moved.
When I was 11, I wrote bad poetry about flowers and observations about my family in a yellow spiral notebook on which I had scrawled “Private” dozens of times. I did not remember that I kept a journal when I was 15, a kind of Adrian Mole dossier of my adolescent attempts to understand paintings, films, and books. I quite forgot that I had a diary my nineteenth year, when I studied in London for a semester, ticket stubs from the theatre glued to its pages along with telling asides, as when I noted I saw Joseph Fiennes nude in a production of Peter Whelan’s The Herbal Bed. I forgot that I kept one, quite steadily, the couple of years I was first out of college and so lonely I had little else to do with my time. I forgot that, well, my adult diaries can be quite — salacious. You’re only young once, I suppose. I forgot that I kept one later, in the period when I first met the man I’d eventually marry, writing about him as a stranger, something I can no longer see him as.
I recognise the person narrating his life in all these pages, because I’m him, and because my interests remain largely the same. This proves something I’ve suspected, my own children my only evidence: we are mostly ourselves from the outset. As such, my inconsistently tended diaries are less a record of a lifetime’s personal development than I’d have guessed; they are a catalogue with little variety, maybe nothing more than an exercise in vanity — the self, presented for an audience of that same self.
Most surprising to me were the diaries of my twenties, describing events that were part of my adulthood that are nevertheless as hazy as if they’d happened to a toddler. Who is this person who wrote of staying up until four in the morning, in the childhood bedroom of a boy he was impossibly smitten with? “I don’t understand A,” I wrote. At least 46-year-old me understands him. I want to warn that younger self away from unrequited love. I wrote of other boys who did not return my affections (no shortage of those), as well as boys who did; it’s some comfort that I’ve forgotten them equally. There are names of supposed friends I find completely alien, notes about jobs I’ve forgotten I held, anecdotes of meals I’ve no memory of eating, trips I don’t remember taking. The person doing the writing, though, he feels familiar.
Here’s an entry from March of this year: “My feeling of inaction continued. I went for a long walk despite the fact that it was pouring rain. I watched Persona, which I loved, and fell asleep kind of unhappy.” This is just humiliating enough that it could have been written when I was 15. It wasn’t so long ago, so I remember that March day (the rain, Bergman, malaise), but it is hardly the kind of moment I need to preserve for some future self, just a thing that happened, with no particular significance.
I wonder whether even at six years old I had a sense that writing was my calling. I wonder how long I’ve believed that my own life was worth documenting. I feel a private smugness when I write my daily entry, a sanctimony from maintaining this mostly pointless resolution. But I think I’ve also long had some sense that being a diarist is virtuous, like flossing one’s teeth.
This is obviously silly. There’s no inherent value in my having jotted down the evanescent stuff of life. There’s no point to it at all, save to distract me once every 14 years or so when I happen upon the box of all these notebooks. Though I suppose I could try to publish these, someday, at least the salacious ones. I’ll almost certainly need the money.
Rumaan Alam's new novel, 'Entitlement' is out now (Bloomsbury). This piece appears in the Autumn issue of Esquire, subscribe here
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