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Do you keep a journal?
I go through stages where all I want to read are journals. Not yours, jeez, I’m not a monster. I mean published journals: May Sarton; Annie Ernaux; Virginia Woolf. I love these intimate peeks into people’s lives. Heidi Julavits’s The Folded Clock. (Are there other books like that? Can you tell me your favorites?) It’s a form less processed and even more personal than a personal essay. It’s just so — intimate.
People who are outside of the Journaling Lifestyle sometimes suspect that journalers are solipsistic sorts, but I happen to believe that examining your own thoughts and reflecting upon your own actions actually makes you into a less insufferable person. Hello, the unexamined life is not worth living? As Socrates and/or Madonna said? Ring a bell?
One can’t write intelligently or interestingly about much, let alone one’s own life, without have done a lot of reflection.
Sometimes I reread my own journals (those are not published but I do have my own consent to read them). Since I’ve been journaling off and on since I was in high school, I have created a lot of content for myself, and I find these volumes to pretty useful resources in the project of life. Sometimes — often! — my own journals make me cringe. And sometimes they help me to remember things that would have disappeared forever otherwise — people, scenes, events, thoughts that I would have completely forgotten left to my own devices. And to me that’s really the purpose of the journal. As Joan Didion writes in “On Keeping a Notebook” : “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”
I think that my journals have saved my life. Maybe that’s a touch dramatic. But they did, for example, help me to find a sense of clarity when I was needing to make a big, life-altering decision, and was doubting myself. I was doubting myself in part because I was being told that my perception of reality was incorrect. This was confusing, to say the least. But then I remembered I had the receipts. Reading years of my own journals helped me to see patterns and realities that indeed had existed for years — even if I was an unreliable narrator to myself at the time, reading them years later I could see through my own bullshit. The facts were there, and often not how I remembered them, so it was incredibly useful to have a record.
Being aware of one’s own thoughts and feelings is, of course, dangerous. I love the way Alba de Céspedes’ 1952 novel Forbidden Notebook acknowledges this — when the narrator starts keeping a journal, actually taking a minute to think about how she really feels, she realizes she’s incredibly trapped and unhappy. She’s just kinda been too busy to notice before. Now she’s faced with a dilemma — does she keep living her unexamined, low-key miserable life, or does she make some big, difficult changes? Inconvenient to be sure, but — well I mean I guess it’s a real question: Do you want to live completely honestly? Some people might not! I do, but I admit it can be annoying.
So, again I ask: Do you keep a journal?
I know it’s divisive question. People tend to either respond Yes I love journaling! or to avert their eyes, shuffle their feet: I can never keep up with it; I end up only writing when I’m upset; I start but then I stop. Just for the record I’d like to say, there is no wrong or right way to journal, and journal-shame (like any kind of shame, I suppose) always seems like it’s really about something else.
It troubles me that people feel so antsy or afraid of journaling. We’re so encouraged, nowadays, to share the most superficial parts of ourselves — to post highlights or passing thoughts, creating content for tech billionaires. Okay I know that’s cynical, but like, if the product is free you’re the product, ya know? (Shout out Substack love you sorry no offense!)
And yet, when encouraged to merely record — for no audience, besides our future selves — the less superficial parts of lives, we feel daunted. Even though there’s no wrong way to journal. You don’t have to do it everyday, for example. You don’t need a pretty notebook or nice handwriting. Trust me, mine’s barely legible even to myself. Take that, snoopers!
That’s of course something else that blocks people from recording their innermost thoughts: the fear that someone will read one’s journal without one’s permission. I heard a harrowing story recently of something going through a divorce and having the ex steal and read their journals and try to use things against them. I once knew someone whose partner read their journal and then confronted them about something private they’d revealed in those pages. To this I say: what a betrayal. Someone there has done something wrong, but it was not the journaller. To me, it would feel like a form of assault, to have my journals read without my permission and then used against me. But, like with, say, street harassment — let’s remember that this is the reader’s wrong-doing, the harasser’s fault. We don’t blame victims, right? RIGHT?
Anyway. I mention all this because I think journals are one of the most helpful tools a writer can have, so I hate when writers feel that journals are too tedious, difficult, or dangerous to employ. A journal can help you make sense of the formless stuff of life, for one thing. As a writer, it can be a low-stakes place to play with ideas, a format for experimenting with voice, a way to clear out the mind (a la Julia Cameron’s famous “morning pages”). The latter is maybe the most important — for me, anyway, if there’s something that’s happened to me that I want to write about, first I have to journal about it in the most unfiltered, unedited, artless, raw way possible, before I can even get close to making something like art from it.
I feel so strongly about journaling, in fact, that I’m thinking of developing a kind of class or workshop about it. What do you think? Would you be interested? Here’s what I imagine: we meet for an hour on zoom. I share something from a published journal by way of an optional prompt. Maybe sometimes we’re looking at something with visual components, like drawings or collages. We write together. That’s it. It’s a journal you’re working on, no need to share out with the group. But at the end of the hour we have some space for discussing: what was this experience like? What came up?
I need some help developing this class (if it can even be called a class?), so I’m thinking to do a trial run this fall. If you’d be interested in trying this with me, please fill out this form!
And if you’re feeling tangled up about something in your writing life, I highly recommend taking some time to journal before you refocus on the work-in-progress. Sometimes there’s just some cobwebs that need clearing out before we can tend to our fictional (or nonfictional) selves.
Are you a journaller? Do you want to be? Tell us about it in the comments. Or maybe it’s none of our damn business, in which case, write about it in your own journal, won’t you?
Speaking of personal narrative (were we?) here’s a little tiny essay that I wrote about sharing locations as a love language, for Jane Pratt’s new substack, accurately called Another Jane Pratt thing!
Oh also one more also! My next novel, Animal Instinct, is available for preorder! According to my publishers: “Fleishman Is in Trouble meets Big Swiss in this darkly humorous and tantalizing pandemic-era portrait of sex, divorce, and midlife, about a Brooklynite who frankensteins the perfect lover.” Preorders mean a lot to writers and publishers, they really really really really really do. (Oh and nice reviews on Goodreads! NICE I SAID PLEASE)
A small programming note for you read-all-the-way-to-the-bottom types: After two+ years of writing this newsletter for free, I’ve paywalled my archive. This means that each monthly letter is still free, but anything older than a month is behind the paywall. If the $5 is not possible, but there’s something in the archives you wanna check out, let me know. :)
Yes to journals of all sorts! For reflection, for generative writing, for brainstorming ideas for creating a good life, for each book project, for collecting inspiring quotes, for exploring spirituality. My journal collection is my embarrassment of riches. Don't know what I'd do without them. They keep me sane and happy.
I also love reading published journals—The Folded Clock is great. I keep a journal, and have allowed myself to also just make lists in it/them—as I have a hard time settling on the perfect notebook.