From lit.newcity.com
By Mary Wisniewski
The Chicago reporter, who's written eighty-two volumes of diaries over almost sixty years, is out with a book on her lifelong practice
Chicago reporter Betsy Rubiner’s oldest surviving diary is from 1967, when she was eight years old. It was one of those Page-A-Day books, with a beige, faux-leather cover and a now-busted lock.
Revisiting that diary many years later, Rubiner found a page labelled “IDENTIFICATION,” with fill-in-the-blank lines for name, address, phone and so on. One blank was for weight. There was a scribble on the line, followed by “59” written in pencil. Looking closer at the scribble, Rubiner found that she had originally written “60” and crossed it out. “I smile, recognizing my lifetime habit of fudging my weight,” Rubiner writes in “Our Diaries, Ourselves.” “This is me.”
Since that first little book, Rubiner has written eighty-two volumes of diaries over almost sixty years. They’re packed into a grey fireproof filing cabinet. Knowing she wouldn’t live forever and not wanting to destroy the journals, Rubiner looked into how she could donate them. The existence of women’s archives that preserve diaries piqued her interest—she hadn’t known there was a world of such donations. Then her son asked her a crucial question—“Why have you written a diary for so long?”
A longtime journalist, Rubiner opened the investigative floodgates on diaries. What counts as a diary? Who keeps diaries? Why do they keep them?
And how do they contribute to our study of history? On her search, Rubiner read old diaries—from famous ones like those of Anne Frank and Samuel Pepys to lesser-known accounts by nineteenth-century farm wives. She interviewed diary scholars, talked to diarists, visited archives in Europe and the United States, and even learned about a “diary festival” in an Italian village that also boasts a diary museum. Mixed in with the scholarship is Rubiner’s own diary journey, including snippets about John Lennon’s murder and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack.
The result is Rubiner’s quirky, fascinating and deeply reported book, “Our Diaries, Ourselves: How Diarists Chronicle Their Lives and Document Our World.” Rubiner says her research made her feel less like an oddball for keeping a journal so long and faithfully—there are diary lovers everywhere. And their numbers may be growing, with some young people turning toward analogue activities, like writing with pen and paper. Stationary stores are seeing lines of shoppers.
I am also a long-time diarist—writing almost daily since I was twelve. For ten years, I’ve taught a class on diary writing at the Newberry Library. So after reading Rubiner’s book, I interviewed her at a Women and Children First bookstore event to learn more about her adventures in what she calls “Diary-land.”
“One of the things that I really found fascinating is how people go to such great lengths to write diaries,” Rubiner says. For example, in the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, there’s a diary written on toilet paper by a resident of a battered-women’s shelter.
“It was sent in by this woman who said ‘I didn’t have any other paper supplies, so I wrote on toilet paper,’” Rubiner says. It was carefully preserved in an elegant box packed with foam and archival paper. “She was desperate to write, apparently. I saw that time and again, even just with people who had these incredibly long days… They plucked seven chickens, washed three loads of laundry in scalding water, this litany of chores. And then they still found time at the end of the day or whatever part of their day to write a diary and to record this. To me, that was astonishing.”
While both women and men have kept diaries over the centuries, Rubiner notes that diaries kept by women had been less valued in the past because they often dealt with domestic matters, like baking bread and nursing children, instead of war and politics. But women’s diaries often show how private life was lived in the past.
An example is the diary written by Martha Ballard, a midwife in Hallowell, Maine from 1785 to 1812. “A Midwife’s Tale,” a book by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich based on Ballard’s diary, won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1991. Ballard “was literally in everybody’s business,” Rubiner says. “She was delivering babies in the 1700s and knew all kinds of stuff about life in that period for women and obstetrics.” Rubiner talked to Ulrich, a history professor who had been trying to piece together the lives of women. “She said other people dismissed the stuff in here as trivia.”
Another famous woman’s diary is that of Anne Lister, a nineteenth-century English woman who chronicled her lesbian affairs. Also known as “Gentleman Jack,” Lister’s life was made into a BBC miniseries.
Rubiner talked to American diary scholar Rebecca Hogan about why women have kept diaries through the centuries. “Many women have found, in diaries, a tangible form for saving their lives,” Hogan told her. British writer Sarah Gristwood, who reviewed 400 years of women’s diaries for the 2024 anthology “Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries,” said that the strongest emotion expressed was “anger—frustration.” A diary from Sarah Welch Hill, living in nineteenth-century Canada, tells of her husband’s abuse. “He became outrageous threw the clothes off me & became extremely violent…”
Rubiner also explores whether diaries are therapeutic and can help with creativity. Rubiner quotes novelist Madeleine L’Engle, who started a journal at age eight and advised young writers “to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you.” Rubiner also quotes Joyce Carol Oates, who called journal writing “immensely helpful” to develop the essentials for a writer. Rubiner sums these up as “the ability to observe closely, to think deeply for sustained periods of time, to describe the world in language.”
“Our Diaries, Ourselves” also looks at the touchy subject of whether diarists should destroy their work, or reread it. Some people burn their diaries because they’re too embarrassing, or they don’t want to cause hurt after they die to family members because of what they wrote.
Rubiner quotes Joan Didion, who argued in favour of reading about our old selves: “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4am on a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”
For diarists who choose to preserve their work, Rubiner has found a surprising number of repositories. A long-time resident of Iowa and former reporter for the Des Moines Register, Rubiner has chosen to donate the contents of her grey filing cabinet to the Iowa Women’s Archives. She reports that Europe has at least ten archives focused on collecting the unpublished work of ordinary people.
While the United States doesn’t have the same well-developed archive tradition, Rubiner reports of two separate efforts to create an American diary archive, both started in 2022. The American Diary Project collects the diaries of “ordinary, everyday Americans” and thus far has 300 handwritten volumes. It relies on trained volunteers to transcribe them.
Another project was started by five diary collectors, including Chicago-area author Robert K. Elder. The archive intends to collect both diaries and letters written by people from all walks of life.
Rubiner tells me that her diary habit has helped shape her personality. “I’m probably a little bit more overanalytical at times,” Rubiner says. “I think I get myself a little bit more than I might have otherwise, if I didn’t write a diary as long as I have. I don’t know who I would be, if I didn’t have a diary, or didn’t have this diary-writing thing that goes on every single night.”
Ruiner admits that occasionally she has overdone her diary habit, and that despite all its benefits, sometimes writers may ruminate too much in diaries and accent the negatives in their lives. “Like anything that I think generally is a good thing, it can be a bad thing if you overdo it, or don’t necessarily do it in the right way.”
Rubiner writes that one problem with her decision to donate her diaries is that she now thinks of future readership, and sometimes senses other readers looking over her shoulder. She writes, “I have vowed to guard against creeping self-censorship. If I can’t be myself, on any given day, I’ve lost my most powerful reason to keep a diary.”
“Our Diaries, Ourselves: How Diarists Chronicle Their Lives and Document Our World”
By Betsy Rubiner
Beacon Press, 272 pages
https://lit.newcity.com/2026/05/20/betsy-rubiner-looks-at-the-hows-and-whys-of-journaling/
