People are mad about diaries.  They read them, write them, attend  “journaling” workshops, forget about diaries after a few entries, or  burn them (though “open burning” is illegal these days). Everyone loves a good tell-all diary, but there are also  travel diaries, weather diaries, grief diaries, sketching diaries, and creativity journals.

In my favorite episode of the ’80s sitcom Newhart, ‘Write to Privacy,” Stephanie, a rich, preppy blonde who works as a maid at Dick Lowden/Bob Newhart’s inn, finds her boyfriend’s diary and stomps on it to break the lock. Dick’s wife Joanna chides her but soon both are indignant about Michael’s candid criticism.  He writes that he sometimes wonders if Cupcake (his nickname for Steph)  is a nice person, and fulminates about Joanna’s perpetual perkiness.  The episode ends with their apology for violating Michael’s privacy. Steph loves him. She couldn’t live without him. They are my favorite comic couple.

We clamor to read famous people’s diaries and journals.  Memoirs are more popular, but diaries are more intimate.

Every day I read an entry from Samuel Pepys’s diary.  (You can read the diary online at https://www.pepysdiary.com/  ). In 1600 he began to write the diary and stopped 10 years later. He makes me laugh. He’s the kind of guy you’d like as a friend. And it’s fun to read about life in the 17th century.

The first author’s diary I read was The Diary of Anais Nin. Nin, a lyrical, meditative writer of surreal novels who grew up in France, Cuba, Spain, and New York, trained as a psychoanalyst, attended parties with famous artists and poets, and ran a small press. Her friends advised her to publish her diary.

And it truly is a magnificent diary.  She writes in Acapulco in 1947 (Volume 5): “I am lying on a hammock, in my room at the Hotel Mirador, the diary open on my knees, the sun shining on the diary, and I have no desire to write…. This is perfection. There is no need to portray, to preserve.  It is eternal, it overwhelms you, it is complete.”

I am a fan of Virginia Woolf’s novels and essays, but have not read her diaries.  Some years ago I read A Writer’s Diary, a selection from her diaries edited by Leonard Woolf. For now, that is enough.   I do, however, recommend her arch-rival Katherine Mansfield’s Letters and Journals, edited by C. K. Stead.  Mansfield is lucid, observant, lyrical, and has just the right amount of bitchiness.  We don’t read the diaries of saints.

.Then there’s something called a gratitude journal.  I’m a bit of a pessimist, so I can’t take this too seriously, but I do occasionally write “I’m grateful for…” in my planner. In Meg Mason’s novel, Sorrow and Bliss, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize, the cranky heroine writes a novel in a gratitude journal.  She’s as cross about gratitude journals as I would have been a few years ago. In fact, this novel is where I learned of their existence.

I’m trying, perhaps in vain, to be mellower these days.