The Would-Be Diarist

From theamericanconservative.com

By Peter Tonguette

I have reached the point in life in which most of the Christmas gifts I get are ones I have gotten for myself. Consequently, I approach the task with a certain unsentimental efficiency. The question is less what I want than what I need: a new sweater, a better overcoat, a smarter wristwatch. To acquire these items at Christmastime adds a certain jolliness to what would otherwise be practical purchases.

This Christmas, however, I took the liberty of giving myself a Christmas gift that was less a reflection of a nagging need than an expression of a wish for myself for the coming year: that, after a lifetime of trying, I could turn myself into a writer who maintains a daily diary.

Among the little stack of presents waiting for me after church services Wednesday morning was a “ledger book” from the leading journal and stationary maker, Levenger. Bound in cloth, the book holds 200 sturdy ruled pages whose vast blankness cry out to be filled with their owner’s thoughts—and their owner now is me.

From Flannery O’Connor to Dawn Powell, many of my favourite writers kept diaries, though few can claim greater steadfastness in the practice than Herman Wouk. The author of The Caine Mutiny, Youngblood Hawke, and The Winds of War had long been one of my favourite modern American novelists, but he jumped to the front of the pack when he revealed, in a memoir published when he was 100, that he had been maintaining a diary for most of those years. 

“Until recently I kept a frank private diary, which ran to more than a hundred bound volumes,” Wouk wrote in Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author. “It will remain private. Call it my nature, or a pose, or what you will, the adjective often attached to my name has been ‘reclusive.’ Now it must stand.”

I remember savouring those words: one hundred bound volumes. That Wouk could document his daily joys and woes with such constancy—and with no expectation that they would ever be made public—was an inspiration for someone who has been, his entire life, a reluctant and often failed diary-keeper. (I should note that Wouk’s assertion that the diaries will “remain” private is not entirely accurate: The author, who died in 2019 at age 103, gave his diaries to the Library of Congress, though, according to the Finding Aid to the Wouk collection, access to them is restricted until 2039.)

As for myself, I could never muster the candour to write for myself and myself alone, so my infrequent and entirely unsuccessful attempts at diary-keeping have consisted of self-conscious, self-important entries obviously meant to be read by some future reader—a frankly hilarious notion for a little-known writer of arts criticism and chronicler of the passing political scene. 

Later, the reasons for my reticence shifted. As a professional writer, I found myself constitutionally incapable of putting pen to paper without the promise of a paycheck. I even find it difficult to write a piece on “spec”—that is, without the go-ahead from an editor at a fine publication such as The American Conservative and thus without the assurance of remuneration—so the idea that I would take the time away from my paying work to write for myself was anathema. 

Apart from elementary school journals that were assigned and graded by the teacher (and thus not real journals at all), the first diary I tried to keep was a notable failure. It, too, began with a Christmas present: When I was 13, my parents gave me a beautiful leather-bound diary book. I endeavoured to fill it, but for months, I filled it with quotations by favourite authors. The diary became not a repository for my own thoughts but a collection of creeds by others. I took most of the quotes from Jill Krementz’s photography book The Writer’s Desk—itself a gift that same Christmas, which meant I was essentially transcribing the wisdom from one book I owned to another book I owned. I still remember some of the quotes I copied into my diary, including this one by novelist William Styron, speaking of the labours of his trade: “I get a fine warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let’s face it, writing is hell.” Indeed.

Yet some diary-keeping instinct stayed with me. About 25 years ago, I began keeping a record of every movie I saw in a movie theatre. I’m sorry to report that this diary is not an actual diary but a mere Word document that has survived multiple computer crashes and software upgrades, but it still constitutes something of a guide through my life in motion pictures. The first movie I noted having seen was Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, which I saw at a local multiplex on January 16, 1999. I saw Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner on December 6, 2003, Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur on June 15, 2005, and Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth on July 22, 2009—you get the idea. The most recent movie I saw was Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 earlier this month. (December 2, to be exact.) Alas, even this ersatz diary was not even my idea: I began keeping the log after reading that the moviemaker Peter Bogdanovich (What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon) had accumulated a massive “card file” of every movie he saw as an adolescent and young man. Clearly I had a need to memorialize things, but how to memorialize my own life rather than the movies I saw or books I read?

My diary-keeping remained a notable failure until the last 12 months, when, after the death of my mother, I found myself jotting down thoughts, impressions, memories in whatever vessel happened to be near me at my desk: a daily calendar, a small notebook ostensibly used for story ideas. This habit convinced me that, maybe, I was finally ready to keep a diary for real.

If I can maintain the habit with anything like the faithfulness of Herman Wouk, I already know what I am giving myself next Christmas.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-would-be-diarist/ 

"I’ve written a diary every day since I was 14. What does that say about me?"

From theguardian.com

By Anna Tims

"Hello! I said to myself today that if I do five handstands and flip over it will be an excellent year and I did!” Thus, unceremoniously, began the 41-volume (and counting) story of my life. It was 1984 and I was 14, fumbling through adolescence in a scarlet beret. My likes, according to a list on the front page, included jacket potatoes and graveyards. My new year resolutions were to “see how long I can go without cake” and “improve my character.”

I haven’t missed a day’s entry since that 1 January. My past crams two bookshelves in rows of page-a-day journals. It’s startling how little four decades seems when it’s represented by slim, stacked spines.

I have little idea of the tales they tell. Most of the entries have lain unread since I wrote them. Yet every morning, I hunt down my fountain pen (life must be recorded in a pen that takes itself seriously!) and write up the previous day. If ever I were to miss one, it would seem it had never happened; if my diaries were lost, I’d feel my foundations had buckled. Journaling is a chore and a panacea, and yet I still can’t fathom why I do it.

There are many reasons, according to Fiona Courage, director of the Mass Observation Archive that collects personal records of everyday life in the UK. “Some people want to leave something of themselves to posterity,” she says. “Some find it therapeutic. Virginia Woolf’s diaries were a way of practising her writing.” Courage says that the habit soared during the Covid lockdowns as people realised that they were living through history. “Diaries give you the ability to distil your experiences and make sense of them,” she says. “For historians they are priceless as they record social trends, layers and details that wouldn’t make it into the history books. They plug a gap in the everyday.”

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) wrote diaries to practise her writing. Photograph: Alamy

I had no inkling of what I’d started when I recorded that first New Year’s Day. My mother, a local historian, had nagged me for years to keep a diary so that future generations might learn what a 20th-century teen did for fun and ate for dinner. It was more an urge to write that motivated me to begin. I did not, I had sadly discovered, have a novel in me. There was a point, I like to think, when it dawned on me that life is its own story. A series of chapters, an evolving cast of characters, a thickening plot and an unguessed ending.

Those future generations will have a very misleading idea of the 20th-century teen. Doris Day provided the soundtrack of my youth. My recreation was climbing trees. While classmates danced at discos, I was in bed with Anne of Green Gables. Adolescent passion passed me by entirely. My heart was broken by the deaths of pre-war film stars, announced in lurid felt tip in the page margins, rather than boys.

Over the years, the entries evolved from a record of school lessons and domestic routines to confessional and reportage. And I can chart my startled ageing: “I’m much too young to be so old so soon,” I marvelled on my 21st birthday.

On my 30th: “My face is lumpen, my body stale and my hair like tinned sardines. Feel every inch of 30.”

When 40 arrived: “My haemorrhoids are growing and my brain is shrinking. However, I am quite contented to be 40, if a little awed by my antiquity. I have always known that middle age would suit me and feel qualified now to march about in large hats berating miscreants.”

Fiona Courage, director of the Mass Observation Archive, says: ‘Diaries give you the ability to distil your experiences and make sense of them’. Photograph: Roger Holfert/Alamy

Now, when I look back on them, those volumes do read like a story. A chronicled life seems more like a plot with a sense of direction than a puzzle of random events. The darkest times – the night my mother was run over and the long years of her recovery; two unexpected redundancies – are, reading back, no longer isolated intrusions, but part of a developing narrative. I can read the chapters with a God-like omniscience. I’ll know, if I follow that misfit teenager through four years of school, how things turned out. Which hopes came good, which friendships lasted; how, now and then, foes became benefactors.

I could trace how becoming a university sacristan at 20 to please a dishy chaplain began a chain of events that led, seven years later, to my husband. Or, further back, how a crush on my new German teacher at 14 inspired me to study German at university where I encountered that dishy chaplain. I know that the self that celebrated the arrival of 1996 as a sorry singleton (“While the others waltzed, J and I washed up and reflected mournfully on our unloved state. It’s a condition that has landed us the worst bedroom behind the wellington boot depot. No one brings us tea in bed and no one dances to the Pogues with us”) would meet at a ceilidh, before the year was out, the man I was to marry: “I found myself paired with a priest. I was instructed to ‘grab his left’ and do a Doozy Doo. He kept coming back for more, so we ‘stripped the willow’ successfully together and later I found myself contemplating the pros and cons of marriage to a curate.” And I can confirm that five handstands and a flip ensured that 1984 was “not at all bad, despite Orwell’s ominous predictions.”

You pay more attention to the world when you know you’ll be writing it up. I pen character sketches of strangers I meet – a pony-tailed sheet metalworker from Avonmouth who revered Prokofiev, the substantial matron in a waiting room “who described to me her knicker situation”. I want to do justice even to the dullest day because life is a privilege and the mundane of today will be tomorrow’s history.

I recorded my first sight of a mobile phone, wielded from a pulpit as a spiritual aid, in 1985: “‘Can anyone tell me what this is?’ asked Father R, holding up what looked like a bendy grey banana.” In July 1996, I sent my first email “all on my own”: “This,” I marvelled, “could become an addictive device. [My colleague] and I spent the morning pinging simpering messages to each other across the desk like toddlers with toy phones, but they take up to an hour to arrive so I shall still prefer faxes.”

                            Dear Diary… Anna Tims with her life’s work at her desk. Photograph: Alun Callender/The Observer

In the privacy of a diary, ego can take precedence over world events. Wars raged, governments came and went while I focused on domestic headlines. “Today, I threw out the old Boden catalogue,” began 20 January 2009. “Barack Obama was inaugurated president also, so one had a vague sense of historic-ness as one flossed and hoovered, but the former event seemed to me more significant!”

It’s never too late to start a journal and a life is never too dull to record. As the years pass and memory fades, I find it a comfort to know that I can dip at will into childhood or child-rearing and that milestones are preserved. I imagine my future self in a care home, faculties slipping, reliving my first property purchase: “I examined my feelings at being a flat owner, but it didn’t seem real. I must buy some hyacinths and cats.”

My first date: “I wish I hadn’t said my beer tasted of pus; he must now think I suck boils!”

My first born: “All of a sudden E was holding a large, pink, alert baby of a size quite unfeasible given the manner of exit. It didn’t seem remotely real that this was mine.”

I feel that if I were to read from the first entry to the last, I might find an answer to a question I can’t articulate. But time travel can become unhealthily consuming so I do it sparingly. The past still lives on in those pages and I can feel it closing over me if I linger there.

In lockdown, I read every day of my university years. It was like reading a novel about someone else. I read in suspense of predicaments I no longer recalled and of dramas whose endings I’d forgotten. Unremembered griefs were disinterred; dormant grievances rekindled. Long-lost friends jived to Abba in my student room and long-dead voices spoke again. When I closed the volumes, I emerged blinking into a different century, a different home and a different family and marvelled at the chain of successive days that had brought me here.

But some things are constant. It’s simultaneously reassuring and dispiriting that I remain recognisably the same me from 40 years ago. I continue to transcribe my likes at the front of each diary and jacket potatoes and graveyards reliably top the list. I remain faithful to Doris Day and still wear a red beret.

It’s a weighty business recording a life, yet it’s taught me not to take myself too seriously. When painful moments are written down I can more easily let them go. Seeing life as a story with an unknown number of chapters left to write is both exciting and daunting. My children are already alarmed at the space my life will take up on their shelves when it’s over, but I plan to chronicle the days until I can no longer hold a pen. The only part of the story I’ll never get to write is the ending.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/nov/24/ive-written-a-diary-every-day-since-i-was-14-what-does-that-say-about-me

It's like One Day, 365 days a year: how keeping a diary helped me chart the rollercoaster of my 20s

From standard.co.uk

By Katie Strick

July 15, 2019. The day after my first big breakup. According to the little dog-eared five-year diary I keep in the drawer next to my bed, I cycled into work in my biggest pair of sunglasses and my best friend met me on a bench with a packet of Sainsbury’s strawberry pencils because I couldn’t face the thought of going home to my flat.

The same day the following year looked pretty different, unsurprisingly. This frightening thing called coronavirus had arrived (yep, we still used the long version back then) and apparently I did two workouts in my parents’ garden because there was literally nothing else to do. I won’t bore you with the details of my 2021 and 2022 entries because they largely involve dates with men who turned out to be, well, early-days Dexters — a reference you’ll understand if you’ve been binging and blubbing over One Day, David Nicholls’ famed novel-turned-Netflix adaptation like me.

AMBIKA MOD AS EMMA AND LEO WOODALL AS DEXTER IN ONE DAY

LUDOVIC ROBERT/NETFLIX

Still, my July 15ths haven’t all been breakups and lockdown boredom. In fact, apparently it was the 2023 edition that saw me walk into a pub garden, unknowing that I was about to meet the three future housemates who would introduce me to some of the women I’d call my BFFs today. It’s funny, really, the benefit of hindsight and how much can change in a year or five.

I picked this particular date for obvious reasons, of course. It’s the same date you probably have etched into your mind, too, if like me you’ve spent the last week devouring Netflix’s new One Day miniseries starring Leo Woodall and Amika Mod. But the truth is I could’ve picked any day of the year. Thanks to my trusty bedside journal, I don’t just have the one One Day to look back on. I have 365 — a fact that comes with the fascinating albeit time-consuming advantage of meaning I can play this fun back of throwbacks every night. Say what you want about dwelling on the past, but for me it’s no wonder nostalgic Gen-Zers are jumping on the journalling train. I can categorically say my five-year-diary is the best £10 I’ve spent in, well, five years.

Journalling is an important reminder that the most significant days of our lives are often the unpredictable ones: when you wake up expecting another dreary Tuesday — then something extraordinary happens

Entertainment value is obviously high up on my pros list whenever I try to recruit a friend to my diary-writing club. Sending stories of Nights We’d Forgotten About (the one where George loses a tooth; the one where Aimee leaves her aubergine on the Central Line...) brings endless joy to my now 30-something set of friends, half of them bored at home breastfeeding or battling I’m-Quitting-My-Job! quarter life crises. Perspective, too, is another useful pro. Nothing puts your troubles into greater focus than knowing you felt similar levels of existentialism 12 months ago over a boy whose name you now need your diary to remember.

There are other note-worthy details you pick up on when diary-writing, too. The slow shifting of friendship dynamics. The gradual wisdom that comes with approaching 30. The themes that come up ever year, like being just-a-little-bit-ill for most of February and just-a-little-bit-rosé-eyed for most of June.

Charting it all has been a fascinating lesson in embracing the rollercoaster that is growing up — and a reminder of something Nicholls conveys so wonderfully on the page: that the most significant days of our lives aren’t always the birthdays or the weddings or the clichéd moments we think they’re going to be. It’s the unpredictable ones: the rainy Tuesdays, when you wake up expecting another dreary plod to the office and then something extraordinary happens that makes you go wow or guess-what or maybe even cry: that run-in with an old flame; that WhatsApp that changes everything; that night away with your oldest friends that descends into aching belly laughter.

It turns out most of us don’t need expensive therapy, half the time. We just need a pen and a couple of minutes each evening to reflect on that work dilemma we lost so many nights’ sleep over 12 months ago; how we needed it to get us to the next juncture we’re at now. Maybe I’ll think myself silly for writing this column in 12 months’ time. Maybe I’ll need a dash of its optimism. And that’s the beauty of it. It’s an empty page right now, one there’s no point trying to fill until it comes round because life is unpredictable, life is messy — and sure as hell is a lot of fun to read back on 365 days later.

https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/one-day-netflix-leo-woodall-dexter-my-diary-b1140338.html 

"I kept a diary of how I use my phone. The results were depressing."

From theguardian.com

By Rhik Samadder

In week 2 of Rhik Samadder’s detox, he hopes to change his behaviour by tracking it. Can he detach himself from his most intimate possession? 

        My favourite thing on my phone: the little dot that indicates I have new messages. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

Is phone addiction a real thing? “It’s not a classical addiction, which typically involves a substance. It’s more of a compulsion.” I’m speaking to Mike Bishop, founder of Summerland Camps, a program of digital detox adventure trips for adolescents.

Bishop believes we will look back on our unregulated screen use the way we regard the indulgent treatment of smoking in the 1930s. He has seen the developmental implications of excessive phone use in young people, but some costs apply to adults too. As examples, he lists negative effects on self-regulation, time management and frustration tolerance (ever been enraged by a video that buffered for longer than five seconds?).

Most clinicians working in this field use cognitive behavioural therapy in their interventions; I think I can borrow some of these principles. The first step is keeping a diary of how I use my phone.

“Any major behavioural change program involves tracking,” explains Bishop. “You have to start writing it down, and develop awareness.”

Monday

Initial observation: my phone is my most intimate object, next to my body all day. It buzzes to get my attention and if a few minutes pass without interruption, I’ll check it anyway. I sleep beside it, reach for it before I’m fully awake. It’s also the last thing I see at night, an ersatz lover.

Here is how I use it: unlock it for a specific task, get distracted by a notification, rabbit hole for a few minutes, then put it down. Remember what I needed to do, pick it up. Get distracted. I presumably repeat this process until I am an old man under a thin blanket, dying of regret.

Tuesday

My favourite thing on my phone: the little dot that indicates I have new messages. It’s like Gatsby’s green light at the end of the dock, the dream of connection. I made a new group of friends last year, and we WhatsApp constantly. We share dating tales, idle thoughts, swap pictures of our hands to judge who’s more dehydrated. We wish each other goodnight like the Waltons. Of all the reasons I pick up my phone 800 times a day, this one gives me a lot of joy. If I do transform my phone behaviour, texting will be the bellwether.

Shopping is a problem: while watching TV, I’m also shopping like a crazy person. My online cart is filled with birdseed and calf rollers and cheese plants, and by the time the credits roll I’ve forgotten what I’ve bought. It’s often a nice surprise to open my door and find these items. Every day is Christmas. It’s a surprise to open my bank statements too.

The idea of being bored for even a few moments is intolerable. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

Wednesday

I’m awestruck by the speed my fingers fly between apps. Opening, flicking up, switching, tapping through, circling back. It feels like my mind is made of mercury. It can be frantic too, as if I’m searching for something I lost.

A notification dot feels like being loved. Sometimes I think that more than the new content – a joke, a link, appreciative words from someone who cares – the dot is really what I want.

No notification dot is like no love. More than simple loneliness, I start to doubt whether I exist.

Thursday

When I think about what fascinates me about any kind of social media, I bear some personal responsibility too.

Say I’m watching a video. Not necessarily anything controversial or political; it might be a small otter indicating to a vet that it wants to be stroked. I’ll head straight to the comments, looking to see exactly how a fight breaks out. Not if, how. It’s always brutal. “This behaviour is unnatural, the animal is traumatised. Pls take this down” is typical. To which others will respond, “cry about it” or, “shut the F up babies are dying” or, “your wig is on backwards Karen.”

This culture war battleground makes me despair. But deep down, I’m thrilled by it. There’s something compelling about the inevitable bin fire of comments: how awful people are, how we can’t get along, and ruin nice things. I’m deeply troubled by this part of myself, which is in all of us.

Friday

I consult a group of friends about their phone use. Most admit to doomscrolling, checking their phone in the night, waking up tired. “I can’t read a book that doesn’t grab me in 45 seconds. But I find time to watch 45 chihuahua TikToks,” despairs Susan.

Not everyone is wringing their hands. “Phones can be a way of carving out time for yourself, if your day is otherwise scheduled by a boss, or kids,” remarks Kate. One introverted friend finds scrolling a mental reprieve from draining group interactions. It starts a debate around “phubbing” – ignoring people you’re with to spend time on a phone. “Why is it any more rude than reading a book?” asks Kate. “That’s snobbery. Get over yourself.”

Saturday

The urge to check my phone kicks in when I’m between activities, when I wait for the bus, when I’m going to sit on the toilet. I will put off going to the toilet until my stomach cramps, if I can’t find my phone. The idea of being bored for even a few moments is intolerable.

Sunday

This has been a sobering week. I have the very clear sense I’m not really a proper adult. I definitely look younger than my years, and don’t dress for them. But there’s something about the childishness of social media I find mortifying to observe. I spend so much of every day looking at silly videos, or running toward a colorful light.

People have written a lot about the gamification element of many apps, but I’m not sure that analysis goes far enough. This week has made me cripplingly aware that all day I reach for, and tap at, virtual rainbow baubles, like a baby in thrall to a mobile.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/08/phone-quitting-diary-week-two