The diaries of a lockdown generation

From bps.org.uk 

When Nicola Madge, Honorary Professor, Kingston University London, and Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the BPS, had the idea to ask a group of over 70s to keep a lockdown diary, she had to act quickly. Here’s what happened…

At the beginning of March 2020 ... I had no idea that I would be embarking on a new, demanding research project, but then again, could any of us have envisaged what was ahead of us during this time?

As a retired professor, I was just at the point of anticipating the publication (and, as it turned out, cancelled launch event) of my newest book Sixty Somethings. The lives of women who remember the Sixties, when we entered a strange and unprecedented period in our lives. There was talk of a virus sweeping the world, and it was getting closer. By mid-March it was clear that it was coming for Britain. Were we prepared and how would we react? 

For my part, I woke up on Thursday 19 March 2020 knowing, like the rest of us, that the first lockdown was about to be announced and wondering what it would mean . Life was going to be more restricted, but I didn't want to just sit it out. I wanted something to do and something that was constructive. There was a suggestion, which in fact never materialised, that those over 70 years might be treated alongside the particularly vulnerable and told to stay at home while others went about their daily business. I began to wonder whether I could get a group of older men and women together to write diaries and record their thoughts, feelings and experiences as they happened. It would be a great historical record if I could. 

Conducting a diary project was pragmatic. Provided it was possible to recruit participants, diary entries would enable accounts to be written in the here and now rather than sometime later when memories might become distorted. It was also feasible in the context of the pandemic.

This approach also had a particularly personal meaning for me. I am the niece of Charles Madge, one of the founders of Mass Observation, a movement initially set up in the 1930s that, among other things, encouraged members of the public to write diaries to record their thoughts and experiences during the second world war. I was keen to follow in his footsteps, albeit in a more modern way. I have also kept a daily diary since I was nine and a half years old. 

The idea grew on me and I immediately drew up a plan for a project. If I was going to do this, I had to act quickly. The pandemic wasn't going to wait. As I was self-funding, and working alone, I could go at my own pace.  

I felt reasonably confident that I would be able to enlist men and women aged at least 70 to take part. Some of the 69 participants in the Sixty Somethings project would fall within the appropriate age group and might be willing to take part. In turn, they might know others who would like to join in. In addition, I had many other contacts that might wish to become involved or who could send the invitation to participate to others. If I was lucky, there would be a snowball effect. Feeling optimistic, I embarked on a recruitment drive on Saturday 21 March 2020. 

The response was enthusiastic and exceeded my expectations. Just over 70 participants were initially recruited, and 68 were finally included in the project. It was essentially a white and middle-class sample, with more than twice as many women as men. Most, but not all, diarists were fully retired, almost all said their living space was good or excellent, and the majority lived somewhere in England. I was fully aware that the participants were not representative of the age group or the population as a whole, but at the same time I could see that the project afforded an opportunity to study a specific demographic in considerable detail. These older diarists would also no doubt provide their perspectives on family and friends, local communities and the wider society. What the study might lack in breadth, it would make up for in depth.

Time was perhaps an important element enabling the project. The diarists, as I discovered, were an energetic group of older people with activities, projects, families and friends to keep them busy. Nonetheless, and for a while anyway, time took on a new meaning when familiar routines were curtailed. 

Anna: Friday 3 April 2020 

What did I do today? It's getting hard to account for time. 

Humphrey: Saturday 2 May 2020

As for the diary of events, or non-events more like, each day melds seamlessly with the next. Could this be what a prison stretch feels like? We know that the best thing is to take it one day at a time, but this way years could slip by.

It was thus opportune that it was just at this time that they were being asked to write diaries. It was a challenge, and it was an occupation. 

The invitation to participate outlined what would be expected. This was, first, to provide some basic demographic information, a pseudonym by which they would be known, and a retrospective diary entry to record their perceptions and reactions since they had first heard of the coronavirus. After this they would write their diaries as often as they could, but hopefully at least three times a week, for an initially unspecified time (which turned out to be the end of July 2020, four months later). They would also be asked to participate in two subsequent follow-ups (which actually became three!) as restrictions changed. Most diarists contributed to the project throughout although they varied in the extent of their contributions. 

I was in constant touch with the diarists and the project kept me occupied. I received some diary entries most days, which I read, acknowledged and logged. There was also a weekly email that I sent round on Thursdays to maintain the impetus and also suggest aspects of the pandemic that diarists might want to comment on. These were often issues raised by diarists themselves. For example, one diarist had asked whether fewer women than usual were wearing a bra during the pandemic. Another wondered whether anybody else had witnessed pets and other animals affected by the lockdowns. 

There were also challenges that were met with enthusiasm by the diarists. First, I instigated a lockdown recipe challenge. Most diarists sent in their favourite meals, with cooking instructions, which I then collated and sent round to all participants. My own recipe for this challenge was my signature dish of ham stuffed with leeks. Subsequent challenges, with entries again collated and sent round, were for a lockdown poem, and for Desert Island lockdown books, films and TV programmes. The project was not only charting an exceptional period in modern history but was fun. I became friends with the diarists even though I had never met most of them. They were confiding and humorous. I wish there had been a lockdown joke challenge! 

As the months rolled by, I needed to set a date for the end of the main stage of the project. I settled on the end of July. It was a relief in that I had gathered so much material that I didn't feel that I needed any more. But it was also sad, the end of a short era. The diarists too were mixed in their views. 

Araminta: Friday 24 July 2020

Another week gone. Where does the time go? I am glad this duty is coming to an end. At the beginning of lockdown, I felt it was important to keep a diary and I have kept my own private one going, but now, as with your diary, I find I am not making many entries.

Sardomike: Monday 27 July 2020

Here we are, writing the final entry, it's been like the Sword of Damocles hanging over one's head, the thought 'oh yes, I have a diary entry to do' but, once started – no problem, enjoyable to let the words flow.

Taranaki: Friday 31 July 2020

Dear Diary, I shall miss you! Today will be my last entry of this long-haul monologue about my life during the 2020 pandemic of the COVID19 virus. It has really helped me to organise and rationalise my thoughts and feelings during this truly ghastly period.

Will: Sunday 2 August 2020                                                                                               

The last day of the diary. It feels almost like a bereavement, having seen the diary as a part of my life for the last few months and as a way of encapsulating what I feel about the pandemic, the government's lamentable handling of it and about everything else that's going on in this country and more widely.

The end of July was, however, more of a reprieve than a finality. Two main follow-ups were to follow. The first was in September 2020 when most restrictions had been lifted and a vaccine was in sight, and the second was in February 2021 following two more lockdowns, the introduction of bubbles, the turnabout at Christmas 2020, and widespread vaccination. Some diarists wrote further entries following the so-called Freedom Day on 19 July 2021. 

Finally, however, the end arrived. The diarists had written around a million and a half words between them, and I had to make some sense of it all. My first task was to go through all contributions again, cataloguing them by broad theme and indicative content. Summaries were then used to plan the structure of the ensuing report. There was an interest in both commonality and diversity among the participants as well as relevant illustration. The purpose of the project was not to test a specific hypothesis but to provide a grounded account of lockdown life for a group of comfortably-off over seventy-year-olds living predominantly in England. 

The data were rich in interest, poignancy and humour, and I was keen to publish the study for the diarists, for social scientists and historians, and for myself. The next task was accordingly to start writing. I would be able to use only a fraction of the excellent material collected, and I needed to tell a story. As the virus was intangible, and had to be surmised rather than seen, I deemed that a, mainly and light touch, framework of symbolic interactionism and related social psychological perspectives was appropriate. Subjective meanings relating to the pandemic were derived from interactions not only with other people, but with the changed physical environment, and the messages conveyed through the media. Pragmatic adaptation and self-presentation, imbued with personal agency, were also very evident among diarists who reacted according to their own perceptions of the changed circumstances. The findings are also set within the political and legal context as well as alongside contemporary research and comment. 

I was, by the time of assembling and writing up the data, in communication with a publisher that was, in principle, interested in publication, but there were a number of review stages to pass through before the manuscript was accepted. It was a protracted task. The publisher was, however, helpful, and most of my wishes were taken into account. The only disappointment on my part was the high cost of the book which I had not appreciated when I embarked on the process. This was a downside of being self-financing and not having funds to reduce the cover price.

Overall, the project was an amazing personal learning experience. Despite having face-to-face contact with a very limited number of people, I was in daily contact with many people I had never met but who were sharing their daily realities with me. I could witness what I could not see. I had a vicarious insight into the reality of the pandemic for a particular demographic. This was a group who acknowledged that they were among the most fortunate, but also had their worries and anxieties, if not for themselves then for their family and friends. I became intrigued by strategies for sanitising shopping and by the myriad uses Zoom could be put to, and sobered by their thoughts on lockdowns and the management of the pandemic. Whatever else, I was most certainly educated and entertained.  

My overall reflections are that I am glad I carried out the project. It was fun and kept me busy at a time when we were locked down in our homes. But I am aware that I was able to carry it out only because I had not been dependent on getting funding and hence held up by the process. In the case of the pandemic, it was essential to get going quickly if the data collected were to be current. If I had still been a fully employed university professor, I would not have been able to conduct the research. The downside, of course, is that I did not have access to research assistance or administrative support. 

There are usually advantages and disadvantages in life and, in the instance of the diary project, I think that the former outweighed the latter. There was also icing on the cake. Nobody else, as it turned out and as far as I am aware, paid such attention to older men and women in their pandemic studies. I had ensured that they were not a neglected group.

• Nicola Madge (2025) Lockdown Life. The pandemic experience for older diarists, Bristol: Policy Press is available from 20 March 2025.

https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/diaries-lockdown-generation

Diary of a Former Wastrel Youth

From thecut.com

By Cat Zhang

                                                            Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Book Covers: The New York Review of Books

In 1986, Vanity Fair sent a rascally New Orleans novelist to cover the corruption trial of the then-governor of Louisiana, Edwin Edwards. Perhaps a mistake: Thirty-year-old Nancy Lemann apparently couldn’t be bothered to note the basic facts of the case, less a courtroom reporter than a hometown caricaturist. She depicted New Orleans as a carnival of eccentrics — jazz-bar creeps, born-again Christians, lunatic politicians. In Louisiana, “people have a high tolerance for ‘human frailty,’ if not a special fondness for it,” she wrote, explaining how such a flamboyant, indiscreet governor got away with so much. (Acquitted at the time, Edwards would eventually serve ten years in federal prison for racketeering.) Her freewheeling draft infuriated Tina Brown, who never ran it; it was revised and eventually published as the 1987 book The Ritz of the Bayou.

Forty years later, Lemann’s transgressions — her rambling theatrics, blatant disregard for exposition, propensity to deem everything “insane” — have been forgiven. At 70, she is the author of a new novel, The Oyster Diaries, her first in 24 years, and the subject of a delayed renaissance. The Ritz of the Bayou is getting reissued alongside her 1985 cult novel, Lives of the Saints. The latter follows a recent college graduate named Louise Brown who moves from New England back to New Orleans. There she finds her peers — high-society “wastrel youths” — strewn about like weeds in a torn-up garden. Gorgeous and rhapsodic, the novel chronicles the decadent beauty of the South’s palmetto groves and antebellum mansions. It’s like a more humid Great Gatsby with the same piercing anthropological insights and doomed characters.

In The Oyster Diaries, the wastrel youth have grown up. The protagonist, Delery Anhalt, was once a heedless bohemian who went boating in hurricanes and got struck by lightning; now she’s a middle-aged woman languishing in Washington, D.C. She has a husband, Jack, and two daughters, Adelaide and Grace. Composed of short, informal entries, the book is Delery’s “diary of remorse.” She enumerates her perceived personal weaknesses — “self-absorption,” “inability to be decorous/gracious/kind,” “overall impotence,” etc. — hoping that by addressing them she can rescue herself from spiritual malaise. “I have no thoughts, no personality, nothing,” she laments.

Delery goes to the opera and Zooms into murder cases in New Orleans as a volunteer court watcher, but she’s occupied by more mundane melodramas: irritating in-laws, ailing parents, her own self-loathing. Caught between generations, she lacks the galvanizing moral conviction of Adelaide, a millennial social-justice warrior, or the dutiful pragmatism of her genteel parents. Delery is also haunted by her younger self, a girl whose journal entries she finds “shockingly unpleasant and ridiculous and unworthy.” But she misses her adolescent enchantment. In one chapter, she recalls sitting in an ancient courtyard in Italy where she hears someone playing Bach’s “Italian Concerto” on piano. “I burst into tears, and thanked god for reminding me of who I am — a person transfixed by beauty.”

The book’s title refers to a list her father kept during purportedly the hardest year of his life — a graded log of all the oysters he ate at a restaurant across the street from his office. A lawyer with a “Germanic steel trap” mind, he stayed with Delery’s mother for 40 years after she cheated on him, though he apparently never forgave her. Unbound from chronology, The Oyster Diaries slips forward and back in time. On one page, Delery is in her mid-40s; the next, she’s reminiscing about a former student who’s now 55. The narrative threads can be hard to grasp. As is typical of Lemann, there’s not much by way of setup.

Perhaps the book’s slipperiness has to do with the discombobulating effects of time, the past always crashing up against the present, as well as the absurdity of life’s wild juxtapositions. Lemann has a talent for bathos, as seen in many comic exchanges between Delery and her daughter: “ ‘I have a nameless melancholy,’ said Adelaide. ‘Is it because of your grandfather so weak in the hospital?’ I asked. ‘Well no, I think it’s because this guy I liked ghosted me.’ ”

Or perhaps the style emerges from a kind of laziness. The Oyster Diaries is cobbled together from existing material, including a 2022 Paris Review story, “Diary of Remorse,” and a 2023 first-person Harper’s essay, “Lions and Daughters,” about a real-life African safari. (“Emmeline,” a.k.a. Lemann’s writer daughter, Emmeline Clein, becomes Adelaide in the book.) Lemann remarks that Africa reminds her of New Orleans, “whether of civilization/humanity, or in the exact resemblance to the overwhelming black population of my childhood and youth there, not sure.” She adds, “My daughters would say I should explore, study, and unlearn certain aspects of these sentiments.” (I’m inclined to agree.) Lemann makes no attempt to hide how much is borrowed. “I just don’t have enough imagination to get in someone’s head,” she said matter-of-factly on the Harper’s podcast. Details are repurposed from past books; the oyster review, for example, first appears in Ritz of the Bayou.

This could be forgivable if The Oyster Diaries led us somewhere new. But Delery never fully lets go in her diary, hiding behind a defensive inanity that one suspects is partially Lemann’s own. The book loses its predecessors’ fundamental conviction. “I could only love one person. This was my innate principle,” Louise says of her love interest, Claude Collier, a reckless philanderer and Lives of the Saints’s tragic hero. He returns in The Oyster Diaries, as flawed and irresistible as ever. It’s then that the book sheds its listlessness. “When I am nervous and mired in angst and malaise, I still say his name,” Delery lovingly confesses. We see a woman restored to faith, transfixed by beauty again.

https://www.thecut.com/article/review-the-oyster-diaries-nancy-lemann-lives-of-the-saints.html

New York Almanack: Mabel Allen’s 1908 Walk in the Park

From newyorkalmanack.com

In 1908,  while attending Syracuse University, Alice Mabel Allen (1886-1976) kept a diary which is being published each week. In this week’s entries, she takes a walk with a suitor and enjoys a visit from her older sister.

Monday, April 6

Had to recite again in math. Roman History report of [?] in the quiz. Splendid letter from Alice with a picture of herself enclosed. Helen and I tried to work logarithms but could not. Rollin phoned and asked me to go for a walk. We went up around by the Davis estate [Thornden Park]. Helen came over this P.M. and Lillian helped us. After supper went walking with Lu, Harriet and Cassie. Fuzzie has been cutting math and I told her I could not help her. Have been feeling small about it ever since, but I was so tired.

Tuesday, April 7

Got up early this morning and finished my Trig lesson. Went down to Helen’s the third period. Read ‘Cuddle Doon’ in elocution. Short letter from [older sister] Edna saying she would be here Friday. Walked down to dentist’s with Harriet. Intent to write a theme but she staid only a short time. Came back and washed hair. Edith came over for me to go walking. Went home with her to get some maple sugar. After supper walked with girls to get some peanuts. Studied Latin with Mabel Gibbons. Syracuse-Amherst concert to-night. I wanted very much to go.

Wednesday, April 8

Rained most of morning. Helen B. and I got math for Friday. Late for dinner. After Latin Lillian and I made fudge downstairs. Mrs. Campbell was away. After tea we danced, I with Mary and Ruth Holmes. Went over to corner store for Harriet when it simply poured. Harriet went out to-night and Mary Bishop. Both wore my coats. Read Roman history in Lu’s room. Wrote on story. Saw blue bird yesterday on Comstock Ave. Cassie sick to-day.

Thursday, April 9

At Shakspere found that I stood third in the quiz. Interesting Roman history lecture  on Nero. After dinner went over to library and wrote theme. Came back and copied part of it. Put on my gray for tea as a Miss Whitney asked me for supper over at Α ƛ Δ. Afterwards we went automobiling on West Genesee St. and James St. After I came back I finished my theme and then studied Latin with Mabel Gibbons.

Wieting Opera House in 1905

Friday, April 10

Studied Trig with Helen and was late for dinner. Came back from Latin and found room upside down, Lillian having been disposed to clean because of Edna’s coming. Studied Shakspere. Jean and Ethel have had a ‘scrap’ with Mrs. Campbell about the board. Walked down to station to meet Edna. She came in by front entrance and I saw wandering around, vainly looking. The girls came in after the lights went out and sang, finally succeeding in getting Mrs. C. up here. Easter post card from Zoe.

Saturday, April 11

Edna had breakfast in the room and then I took her up to English. Lu met us and we sat with her in senior row in chapel. Went down to city with Edna who bought herself a green dress and black silk coat. She took me into the Sterling for lunch and into Schrafft’s for ice cream. Edna helped me with Latin before tea. Danced after supper. The Boar’s Head, a dramatic club, put on Twelfth Night at the Wieting. Took Edna. Perhaps because I was tired, but I did not enjoy it.

Sunday, April 12

Prepared breakfast for Edna in the room, Lillian, Harriet and Lu. As both bathrooms were full, breakfast was late. Made chocolate and poached eggs. Had to hurry to attend service at Park Presbyterian and girls washed dishes. Hazel Thomas invited us for dinner and we had such a cozy time in Edythe’s room. Hazel went with us to Vespers where we met Lu. Staid afterwards and Edna spoke to Mr. Murray. He was very genial and original. We were late for lunch and did not want to go down but Fuzzie and Mrs. C. persuaded us. 

Read more entries from Mabel’s Diary. 

https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2026/04/mabel-allen-walk-in-the-park/ 

Book Review: “Knife-Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois” by Marie-Laure Bernadac

From glasstire.com

“This is my diary. I do not start it with the intention of ever letting anyone read it, not even to reread it myself.” Louise Bourgeois was 21 when she wrote these words in September 1933. The previous month, the young French artist had attempted suicide after her father tried to force her into marriage, and the year before, she had left a degree in mathematics at the Sorbonne to pursue art at various private schools around Paris. Bourgeois was a person in the process of defining herself, and her diary — which she began keeping when she was 11 years old — would be the closest witness to the rest of her long life. But despite her stated wish in 1933, what she wrote there would not remain private.

Knife-Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois by Marie-Laure Bernadac draws heavily from the artist’s diaries, which, it quickly becomes apparent, were a vital outlet for processing, understanding, and transforming herself and the events of her life. Bourgeois’ art practice served a similar though more public function, and part of her work’s notoriety stems from its radical, autobiographical vulnerability. Still, the book’s incorporation of so much of the artist’s unfiltered voice grants readers unprecedented access into her complex and at times shocking inner world. Along the way, Bernadac traces Bourgeois’ groundbreaking career path, from her first major Femme Maison series in the 1940s to her iconic spider sculptures of the 1990s. 

Bernadac is not a stranger to Bourgeois. The two first met in May 1992 to plan an exhibition of the artist’s drawings at the Centre Pompidou, and in the years that followed, the writer organized several more exhibitions and published books on Bourgeois. After the artist’s death in 2010 at age 98, Bernadac gained access to Bourgeois’ immense archive for her project — “Louise kept everything,” she notes — and even stayed next door to the artist’s home while conducting her research. In her introduction to the book, the author discloses her fondness for her subject, confessing to a hope that, “Through writing, I could resuscitate her.” 

Still, Bernadac insists that she “strove for distance and objectivity” in her account. She is especially transparent about her subject’s “profound psychic disturbance,” which is perhaps best evidenced in Bourgeois’ diaries. Frequent selections from those pages immerse the reader in the artist’s innermost thoughts and feelings, showing her to be, in Bernadac’s words, “jealous, manipulative, depressive, lacking in self-confidence, [and] often devastated by terror.” 

The diaries are interwoven through nearly every chapter of the book, and the pain recorded there is at times overwhelming to read. But could we expect any less from the creator of such searing, psychological artworks? And are diaries even truly diaries if they’re not written with excruciating candour? To be fair, later in her life, Bourgeois saw her diaries as crucial records of her own story. “The diary must be seen as a distinct, living entity,” she wrote in 1990, and translator Lauren Elkin handles these unique, often emotionally raw documents — which are penned in Bourgeois’ idiosyncratic blend of French and English — with aplomb.

Louise Bourgeois wearing Coco Chanel, Cannes, 1925. Image credit: The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Bourgeois’ life spanned nearly all of the 20th century. Born in 1911 to a cultured Parisian family, the artist quickly became her parents’ beloved “pink diamond” and the clear favourite among her siblings. While Bourgeois clearly benefitted from this position — she alone was dressed in designer clothing and taken on her parents’ travels — Bernadac argues that the situation converted the artist into “a pawn in the game of power and one-upmanship between her parents,” who were locked in their own cycles of illness (Bourgeois’ mother) and infidelity (her father). “I escaped from a very troubling family,” the artist later reflected about her sudden 1938 marriage to the celebrated American art historian Robert Goldwater and subsequent move to New York City.

In fact, the “trouble” stemming from both Bourgeois’ relationship with her parents and their relationship with each other makes up a large part of the book, as its complexities and consequences continued to haunt the artist and to serve as a powerful impetus for her artworks. Despite the deep psychic wounds they inflicted, Bourgeois repeated the problematic patterns of favouritism and adultery in her own family. Her French-born adopted son Michel was sent off to boarding school and left in the United States for months at a time while Bourgeois, her husband, and their two biological children lived together in New York and travelled to France. And though she denounced her father’s cheating as disastrous to her own psyche, Bourgeois also carried on affairs with other men, including possibly the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) director Alfred Barr, who the diaries show to be a source of passionate, if frustrated, longing.

Louise Bourgeois in her studio, New York, c. 1946. Image credit: The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Bernadac glosses over these poignant personal events without much detail, but she does not sidestep Bourgeois’ acerbic personality, which — along with her undeniably original artwork — often put her at odds with artists in both her adopted homeland and her native France. Some of her difficulty stemmed from what the author calls “the decidedly macho environment of New York,” where both locals and European émigrés put Bourgeois off; the artist later said that surrealists like André Breton and Marcel Duchamp “were not interested in women.” However, Bourgeois seemed to reserve her harshest criticism and fiercest mistrust for her fellow women artists. She calls her long-term rival Louise Nevelson “a parasite,” and writes that Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow “has a face like a crumpled rag.”

These judgments were perhaps connected to Bourgeois’ profound sense of dissatisfaction. Indeed, she was so ahead of her time — and so challenged by internal and external barriers — that definitive success did not arrive until a major retrospective at MoMA in 1982, when the artist was 70 years old. Though she later denied it, Bourgeois spent years in psychoanalysis, sometimes attending several sessions per week. The memories and feelings that she examined there enriched and informed her artwork, as Bernadac shows, but they never quite resolved. One of the most surprising discoveries in the book — in view of the artist’s current celebrity and renown — is Bourgeois’ pervasive and at times debilitating feelings of doubt, loneliness, and insecurity, which continued even into her later years when she had attained an undeniable level of achievement and recognition. “I have a terrible fear of being revealed, lacking, inadequate,” she confessed in her diary in 1990.

Louise Bourgeois with “La famille” (in progress), New York, 2008. Image credit: © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Photo: © Alex Van Gelder

The word “obsession” appears repeatedly throughout the book to describe the artist’s ongoing themes of memory, maternity, eroticism, abandonment, castration, and control, which she explored through a stunning variety of materials and methods. “My emotions are my demons,” she said in the 2008 film Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress, and The Tangerine, and in her book Bernadac demonstrates time and time again how the artist transformed those dark forces into her innovative art. And a great part of that evolution, we learn, also happened through her daily journaling practice. “You can stand anything if you write it down,” Bourgeois wrote in her diary in 1994. “All you need is pen and paper.”

Knife-Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois by Marie-Laure Bernadac was published by Yale University Press on October 21, 2025. 

https://glasstire.com/2026/04/01/book-review-knife-woman-the-life-of-louise-bourgeois-by-marie-laure-bernadac/

The Iran Diaries, 2002

From momentmag.com

By Sarah Breger

Last week, I stumbled on my father’s diary from his first trip to Iran in 2002. My father, Marshall Breger, who died this past August, travelled to Iran three times and spent over 20 years organizing interreligious dialogue with a number of Iranian clerics and scholars. To say that was controversial in the Jewish world would be an understatement, but he believed in the power of cultural exchange and the necessity of face-to-face conversations. The genesis of that first visit was an invitation to give a lecture on constitutional law at Mofid University in Qom, Iran’s second holiest city, but it soon morphed into an 11-day tour all over the country for meetings with scholars, religious leaders and, most importantly to him, the Jewish community. There is something almost eerie in reading his observations from a 2026 vantage point, in the middle of the current conflict; they are a window into what could have been.

                                                                                                          Credit: Mostafa Meraji

Friday June 14, 2002: To my amazement I am met at the airport by a young professor from Mofid and by three members of the Tehran Jewish community—one wearing a kippah. I can almost hear his wry amusement that the men were holding up a sign in Hebrew that said Baruch Habah (welcome) and that they gave him a kosher salami to take on his travels. (That evening I try the salami—not bad.)

He was also surprised by the professor who ended up being his driver and translator for the entire trip and who, as soon as he entered the car, started to pepper me with questions about the differences between Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism. It turned out his guide was a self-taught scholar of Judaism (despite not being Jewish himself)who had translated the Steinsaltz Essential Talmud from English into Farsi. My father would say later that he didn’t realize how many Iranians were deeply interested in Jewish theology and philosophy. In discussing his stay at the law school in Mofid, he noted: My host is an incessant inquirer about Judaism. Just one example—‘If women are not allowed to show their hair if they are married, why should not the State of Israel enforce this rule?’ After wrestling with him about the issues of synagogue and state—I found discussions on the right of return relatively simple.”

‘They assume that youth will determine the next elections and that Iran’s problems will be solved by generational change.’

Sunday June 16: Rarely have I seen women so subservient. In the hotel the guests in chadors beg me to enter before them in the elevator. This was in Qom, by far the most conservative city in Iran. The question of women’s rights and, by extension, how religion plays out in the public square comes up many times in the travel log. When he traveled from Qom to Tehran, he noted a more open and relaxed atmosphere and wrote that women in Tehran merely wore scarves “of sorts” and had developed what he called “modesty chic,” adding: Northern Tehran reminds me of North Tel Aviv, yuppies, parks, broad parkways.

My father wrote that he had many difficult conversations about Israel and observed that Iranians cared deeply about the plight of Palestinians. But some said they were open to the idea of a two-state solution and would accept any deal the Palestinian people agreed to. He was fascinated that Iranians he met drew a sharp distinction between Judaism and Zionism, and that they were more understanding and respectful of Shabbat and kashrut needs than some people in the West.

In Tehran and Isfahan, he met with members of the Jewish communities, who peppered him with questions about Jewish life in America.

After a talk he gave motzei Shabbat (Saturday night) at a synagogue in Tehran, one woman said she had heard kashrut standards were flawed in America: Was that true? Another woman wanted to know if rabbis in America were talking about signs of the moshiach (messiah). “In answering the question about signs of moshiach I told them that many feel the creation of the State of Israel is the dawn of our redemption. I did not pursue the matter.”

In Isfahan, by chance, he had tea in the university guest house with two post-college women—one from Kansas and one from Costa Rica—who had come to learn Farsi. They talked about Iranian society. Her friends, she tells me, care more about jobs (they’re worried) and personal freedoms than reform or revolution. They assume that youth will determine the next elections and that Iran’s problems will be solved by generational change. This was echoed a few days later: Sunday, June 23: I spoke with an acerbic man who lost an arm in the Iran-Iraq war. He was confident about the long term success of reform, pointing out that the conservatives are hoping that the slow pace will turn off youths—or that extreme events—a U.S. invasion for example—would galvanize Iranians to support the regime. In a sense, he said, the conservatives were playing for time, hoping for an external event that would break in their favor.

Hope seemed to be a theme on the trip. The people he met wanted, in their own ways, for Iran to become a more democratic and open society. Of course, that was 24 years ago, and perhaps those he met, by chance or circumstance, were particularly open-minded. Three years after my father’s trip, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be elected and the country would go through governments led by both hardliners and reformists. The system never did democratize, and anti-regime protests, such as those in 2009, 2022-2023 and, most recently, in 2026, were harshly suppressed.

There is no question Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s “Death to America, Death to Israel” rhetoric expressed a central feature of the regime’s worldview. But reading this account of my father’s time there has expanded my perception of Iran. I wonder what happened to the people he met and, if they are still alive, what they are thinking today. The American Jewish community often paints Iran in broad strokes, instead of recognizing that it is a complex, multifaceted society.

https://momentmag.com/from-the-editor-the-iran-diaries/