The person on this site was young, intentional, sometimes small and painfully sure. And to accept it – mine – the shortcomings felt a bit like an act of resistance to pressure that they will get to know as a woman, that she has no shortcomings.
I love a good published diary. I keep Virginia Woolf and “Trunt” and “Daybook” Anne Truitt on my table on my table and stretch them when I need wise advice. Reading about their inner life helps me understand my own. Woolf was a sporadic daily that did not intend to publish her personal writing. Her husband, Leonard, adjusted them to the publication after her death. Truitt, a well -renowned sculptor, published a “Turn” and “Daybook” during his life and the final volume “yield” was taken by her family after his death. These diaries are considered an integral part of her heritage as the extensive works she has left.
When the upcoming “notes to John”, a diary consisting of 49 records that has been in the prohibition, will be released in April in April. This is described by his publisher (also mine) as an intimate, untreated series of posts, many written after the sessions with her psychiatrist, all addressed to her husband John Gregory Dunne in 1999, four years before his death.
Mrs. Didion had many years to decide what to do with the diary. She would know how we would be interested, how bad we want more. Would she want to write a line “I think we are advised to nod with the people we used to be, whether we consider them an attractive society or not,” they want the world to be more than nodding with what I suppose is raw, perhaps unattractive self? Or would she just care? Maybe she would say, always a great customer: “I’m dead, I have it. It’s no longer my business. ”
We’ll never know. But perhaps it is the act of maintaining a diary – to “maintain” to be an operative word – that we remain to nod with all our self, rather than neatly saying harsh or embarrassing pieces. That we own our defective, chaotic narrative, rather than burn it, shred it and throw it away. We understand that we are not defined by one chapter or by mistake or foolish way of being. Whether we encounter our own words, or to our children, or our grandchildren or the world of introductory foreigners, perhaps in this dialogue of one-lated, raw, without discipline-we do not testify to evidence. That we say, it’s me. I was a man. And you’re too.
