From bangordailynews.com
When Hilary Eyestone is visiting her mother, Lynn Bonsey, in Bucksport, they’ll often go for a drive around Hancock County, through Surry, where Bonsey spent much of her childhood and taught middle school for the last 30 years.
“Almost without fail, she will point out some place that she wrote about in her diary,” said Eyestone, a Westbrook resident. “She has it all written down. This house here, this old business there, what happened where. She can kind of fact check her own life.”Bonsey’s diary is the stuff of legend in her family — years of stories, jokes, observations and funny moments in her life, written down in exacting detail in stacks of notebooks. She started it in 1968, at age 15, and continued until the mid-1980s, when she was too busy raising her kids and teaching to regularly keep it up.
Eyestone knew her mother was the perfect storyteller, with her tales of badly behaving boys, youthful mischief and colourful Maine characters. As a platform, TikTok was the perfect place to start sharing her stories with the world.
Last fall, Eyestone and Bonsey launched My Mother’s Diaries, a TikTok account in which Bonsey reads excerpts from her diary in the place where it happened — places like her college dorm at the University of Southern Maine, her grandparents’ old house in Surry, on the side of the road in Ellsworth, and a Howard Johnson in South Portland where she worked as a cocktail waitress in the 1970s.
The posts are sweet, sarcastic and silly, with a touch of dry absurdity — in other words, just the way Bonsey wrote her diary when she was a teenager and young woman.
“I’ve always liked to hear a story and to tell a story,” Bonsey said. “I retired last year and I knew I wanted a project to work on. I can’t imagine how anything could be more fun than how this has evolved. I think it’s made my relationship with Hilary even stronger.”
An early post the pair made on the My Mother’s Diaries TikTok account went viral in May, with 2.1 million views and counting. Eyestone and “Clod” — Bonsey’s first name is Claudia, and her family calls her Clod, though everyone else calls her Lynn — were showing up in people’s TikTok feeds worldwide.
Suddenly, millions of people had heard the story of how Clod cried the first time she had to use the loudspeaker at her job at Zayre’s, or how one day she looked out the window of a Ramada Inn in Portland and saw her boyfriend kissing another woman. Before, those were things she’d only shared with her family and closest friends.
“It was a little terrifying, seeing the views start to pile up,” Bonsey said. “I always tried to write in a light-hearted way, but also in a very authentic way. I’m rooting for that woman who wrote those diaries. I think it’s pretty unusual to keep something as detailed as I did. To go back and go through it all again, and do it in public, has been really interesting.”
In addition to keeping a diary, Bonsey filmed some moments in her younger years with a Super 8 camera. Eyestone has digitized much of that footage and has used it on the TikTok page.
Eyestone has also used that Super 8 footage on the podcast they started back in May, also called My Mother’s Diaries, in which they dive more deeply into Bonsey’s stories — as well as stories from Eyestone’s childhood, split between southern Maine, Massachusetts and Hancock County. Filmed versions of the podcast are on YouTube.
“Honestly, we don’t even care if anybody is listening to the podcast,” Eyestone said. “We’re just having fun cracking each other up.”
They’ve even created a line of t-shirts bearing particularly juicy quotes from the diaries, like “I’m going to Freeport and I’m going to dress in something sexy,” and “Joe called yesterday and told me that some guy on the swimming team told him I was weird.”
“She’s eminently quotable,” Eyestone said. “It’s really funny to think about strangers wearing a shirt with quotes from her diary on it.”
Mother-daughter relationships can span the gamut from warm and loving to complicated and fraught. Bonsey and Eyestone’s relationship is based on humour and honesty, and their love for each other is palpable, which is something their TikTok and podcast followers have quickly picked up on.
“We’ve had people comment and say things like ‘I miss my mom so much,’ or ‘I wish I had this kind of relationship with my mom,’” Eyestone said. “It makes me really grateful for this relationship we have, and the ability to be creative and tell stories together, because that’s really at the root of everything we love.”
In Bonsey’s very first diary entry, dated Aug. 20, 1968, she wrote that if she didn’t think that, in the future, she’d want to “get kicks” out of what she wrote as a teenager, she’d burn the whole thing in the fireplace.
“Boy, am I glad I didn’t do that,” she said. “I guess I saw into the future.”
New episodes of the My Mother’s Diaries podcast go up every two weeks on Apple Podcasts and on YouTube.
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