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Seven diaries you don’t have to sneak-read
I remember vividly the day I read my sister’s diary. I don’t remember what she wrote, but I remember the anxious urgency with which I turned each page, determined to cram as much reading in as possible before someone discovered my crime or before my mind summoned the requisite guilt to make me stop.
I still love reading people’s diaries. In her guide to memoir writing, The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick wrote that memoirists are obliged to “lift from the raw material of life” a tale that constitutes literature. Diaries, then, are anti-memoirs; whereas memoirists are supposed to control their experiences, diarists can embrace their neuroses and spill their guts. They are the “raw material,” unlifted and unshaped. By being so raw (and often very long) they can achieve better than memoirs the literary ideal of dissolving the reader into the life on the page.
The delight the books on this list bring is that of the somehow ever-surprising fact of another human being’s consciousness. Two of them begin while their authors are still children — Plath was 17, Lou Sullivan was maybe 13 — and four of them end just before their authors’ deaths. That these are life stories means they offer plenty of dramatic irony.
These selections are all either available at libraries on the Outer Cape or can be made so through a CLAMS or Commonwealth Catalog interlibrary loan request.
Captain Scott’s Last Expedition by Robert Falcon Scott
In 1910, British explorer Robert Falcon Scott set out to become the first person to lead a team to the South Pole. About a year later, he arrived at the pole only to realize that another explorer had reached it first. Weeks after that, he died of starvation. He wrote in his diary right through to the bitter end. Before that, though, he manages to capture the joy of scientific inquiry and the peculiarities of traveling with a small team of like-minded men. He describes sensations that most of us will never get to experience, like skiing over sheets of floating ice, being vastly outnumbered by penguins, and eating hoosh, an Antarctic stew made of snow, biscuits, and pemmican. (Cape Libraries Automated Materials Sharing, CLAMS)
We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan
Here is a personal history that seems especially important at a time when there is so much misunderstanding about the act of questioning one’s gender. Sullivan’s diaries begin when he is just a little kid and continue until just before his untimely death from AIDS in 1991. Throughout his life, he displays supreme self-awareness as he contemplates his feelings about gender and the benefits and drawbacks of medically transitioning. His diaries are full of romantic scenes and amazing one-liners. “I wanna look like what I am but don’t know what someone like me looks like,” he writes at age 13. “I mean, when people look at me I want them to think — there’s one of those people that reasons, that is a philosopher, that has their own interpretation of happiness.” (At the Provincetown, Truro, and Eastham public libraries and through CLAMS)
The Andy Warhol Diaries
Yes, there’s the Netflix documentary, but still, if you read one book on this list, let it be this one. The pop artist’s diaries, which weigh in at over 800 pages, hearken back to a rich person’s idea of an earlier New York, where limo drivers don’t know how to get to New Jersey, your favorite restaurant charges you double if you dare ask for the menu, and the best reason to hate Donald Trump is because he doesn’t buy your paintings. Warhol’s close attention to the news lends gravity to his book, and every page oozes with celebrity cameos (Patti Smith and Jean-Michel Basquiat both have bad B.O., Warhol claims) and stylish turns of phrase. There’s even a Cape Cod connection: in 1981, Warhol visits Falmouth, where he eats a lot of seafood and listens to friends complain about traffic. (CLAMS)
Baghdad Diaries by Nuha al-Radi
Al-Radi’s diaries about life during the Gulf War and its aftermath are vivid, horrific, and full of bizarre, dark humour. At one point, the author’s friend, who washes her hair with Tide because she can’t afford shampoo, assures her that her chickens are committing suicide. At the same time that her family struggles to obtain food, oil, and water, they also celebrate birthdays, create art, and take up new hobbies. “I must say I don’t feel there is a risk of death, at least for myself,” she writes on day 13 of the aerial bombing. “I know that I’m going to survive this somehow.” Al-Radi died in 2004 of leukemia that she thought might have been connected to the hundreds of tons of depleted uranium that was exploded into the environment during the war. (Commonwealth Catalog, ComCat)
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962
Two things stand out about the famous poet and novelist’s journals: her overpowering insecurity about her writing and her amazing writing. She describes vividly what it’s like to be a young woman genius in the 1950s. It includes a page-long, X-rated rant about how much she loves picking her nose. To Plath, there’s simply nothing quite like those “soft, resilient, elastic greenish-yellow smallish blobs of mucous.” (CLAMS)
The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983–1999, by Thomas Mallon
A novelist and literary critic, Mallon writes like a weatherman reporting from the scene of a hurricane, where the hurricane is himself. Lots of books get written in the present tense so that the reader experiences them more intensely, but Mallon’s hilarious diary is in the real, earned present tense. The possibility that he might contract, or already have, HIV/AIDS terrorizes him, forces him to confront death, and also, miraculously, enhances his awareness of being alive. “I look at a portrait of FDR & think of his monumental life versus my little one & feel that I’m the one who matters because I’m alive, now, this second — & for however much longer,” Mallon writes. Spoiler alert: he survives. (ComCat)
The Notebooks and Diaries of Edmund Wilson
I haven’t (yet) tackled this series of diaries organized by decade from the 1920s to the 1960s, but David Keller, a friend of the Indie, persuaded me that the five books warrant a spot on this list. That’s because in them, Wilson, the journalist and literary critic who bought a house in Wellfleet in 1941, wrote about something other than big ideas. This collection “is about the people he knew and the parties he went to,” says Keller. “He would be very unabashed about describing people quite negatively,” which means some parts of the notebooks are “cringy” and “problematic,” but for people looking to learn more about how the author lived, these books are important reading. (At the Wellfleet Public Library and CLAMS)
https://provincetownindependent.org/arts-minds/2025/12/03/the-guilty-pleasure-of-the-anti-memoir/
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