Introducing Old Diaries

In which I talk to myself

Hello! You are receiving this email because I thought you might enjoy my new newsletter, Old Diaries. As a free subscriber, you will receive a monthly essay by me directly to your inbox. However, if you’d rather not stay subscribed, just scroll to the bottom of this email, click unsubscribe, and I won’t be offended. Or, if you like it, forward it to a friend! Ok, on with the show…

When I first started keeping a diary, around age 9, I was under the impression that one wrote to a diary as if it were a person, in the form of a letter, with a salutation and a formal sign-off at the end of each entry. I didn’t want to write “Dear Diary” so I chose a name instead: “Dear Zoe”. I gave her a backstory in my mind, and sometimes referred to it in the entries: “I know you have a horse of your own”, I’d write, or “How is school in France?”, as if she might respond. Zoe was a posh, French only-child with her own horse named Barnaby. In this way, the diary became a fictional container for my non-fiction days, an illusion that freed me to write unselfconsciously about my own life, and imagine that someone cared about it.

That first diary, addressed to Zoe, was a business desk diary with a few lines allocated for each day, and half that space for Saturdays and Sundays when, it is presumed, not much is going on in terms of business. Even in those tiny weekend squares, when I had even more to recount than on school days, I always signed off each entry with “Yours, Helen.” I maintained the illusion of writing a letter even when it was inconvenient. Did I think it was somehow unethical to simply write down what happened to me every day? Clearly I thought letters a more acceptable form of personal writing.

Diaries are where we put our thoughts and our days, and what else is there but thoughts and days? Sometimes I skip the ‘boring’ parts of essays to get to the personal bits.

Unlike Sarah Manguso, who, in her book Ongoingness, says that she never under any circumstances goes back and reads her diary entries, I often pull out an old notebook at random. I heard Sheila Heti talking on a podcast about how she deleted a decade of her diaries from her computer because she couldn’t stand to read them. This is truly appalling to me, but maybe that’s why Sheila Heti is an Artist and I am, right now, a stay-at-home-mom starting a newsletter.

I originally started writing this newsletter in the summer of 2020, but I was too afraid to send it out, to make it known, so I allowed the first two entries I wrote to just sit, published but still somehow secret, for two and a half years. So I’m sharing my first two entries, from the summer of 2020, here, to give you an idea of the form this project will take:

Old Diaries Vol. 1: July 1995/August 2020

Old Diaries Vol. 2: January 1997/August 2020

Vol. 3 will arrive in your inbox, should you choose to stay subscribed, in January. In Old Diaries, I will write essays prompted by old diary entries, mine or others’. The structure of a diary is the only structure I currently trust. The structure of this newsletter, like those “letters” I wrote to Zoe, frees me from self-judgement.

Eventually, I want to invite other people to dig out old diaries and respond to them, too, and publish those writings here, but I need to send this idea out into the world first, and see what comes back.

Yours,

Helen.

P.S. If you can’t make it out, the diary entry in the image at the top of this post reads as follows:

Today when I got up, I went out to play with Edel. We made a horse club. Then we played in my house and we made some stuff. Then we played in her house. When we had finished we went out to play. I went home and had my dinner. My dad was going to go riding but he would not go without me and I could not go because I shouted at my brother. A horrible end to a nice day. Probably because I saw one magpie. Helen.