8 hours ago
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A few years ago, a friend asked me to be her “literary executor”. We were both, I think, tickled by the grandiose sound of it, as if I would be playing off competing bids from the Bodleian and the New York Public Library for her juvenilia and early drafts (she is not actually primarily a writer). What she wants, though, is quite serious: I am to destroy her diaries when she dies.
That is because they aren’t meant for anyone’s eyes but her own. Whatever is in there (I don’t know, didn’t ask), it was never meant for public consumption. Many diarists feel that way: Sheila Hancock wrote about destroying decades’ worth of hers: “Maybe this vicious, verging-on-insane woman is the real me, but if it is I don’t want my daughters to find out.”
Perhaps the late Joan Didion needed someone like me in her life. The response to the recent publication of her therapy journals, Notes to John, has mostly spanned unease to stark horror. Just those words “therapy journals” explain why, but dismayed reviewers have found them “naked”, “raw” and “brutal” and Didion’s writing “frequently boring”, full of pain that had not been distilled and crafted into the precise, controlled beauty of the life writing she chose to publish. Her assistant, Cory Leadbeater, described their publication as “a deeply uncomfortable thing”. There is a sense of violation – what is it doing out there, in public?
It’s tricky. We would have been deprived of some extraordinary writing if private diaries and journals were never published, from Samuel Pepys to Sylvia Plath or Kenneth Williams. I’m currently reading the Australian author Helen Garner’s, which are full of intimate pain (when an editor suggested their publication, Garner initially, understandably, “freaked”) but also luminous observation, humour and joy. Reviewing them, Leslie Jamison noted, “Sometimes we want the unmade beds, with messy sheets … the fossils of curled hairs on the pillow, the faint salt of dried sweat.” It can feel grubbily prurient, peering at the diary writer’s dirty laundry, but it can also be transporting or deeply comforting.
I think we have accepted the idea of diaries as entertainment too: think of the vogue for events where people read mortifying extracts from their teenage journals, or the publication of more public-facing ones. Alan Bennett and David Sedaris must write with at least one eye to future publication. Garner burned her earlier diaries, but eventually chose to edit, anonymise, then publish these later ones.
You can see an ambivalence about exposure in how some diarists treat their material: Pepys wrote in hard-to-decipher shorthand, but had his diaries bound and carefully preserved. There is an argument that Didion – perfectly aware of her own image and cachet – must have known anything she left behind would end up published. “My guess is … she would completely understand the literary interest,” Leadbeater added.
But there must be a safe place for the entirely private diary – somewhere to tease out pain or document the ordinary, occasionally sublime day-to-day, purely for yourself. That is what makes me wish I had the discipline. “For a diarist life ceases to be an indistinct blur. Experiences are there in sharp focus,” Michael Palin said of his lifelong habit. As I get older, I am realising how dense the blur has become, childhood and adolescence reduced to a few half-remembered, probably wrongly, vignettes. I can’t conjure many memories of my sons as babies either; I would love to have recorded those endless days before the years sprinted away from me.
The thing is, though, I know any diary I wrote would have been too horrifically cringey to reread: self-conscious “literary” pretension, interspersed with whining and domestic resentment (the passages that resonated most in Garner’s diaries were the comforting likes of “I am the only one who ever cleans the lavatories”). I want to burn mine and they don’t even exist. Some underbellies just aren’t supposed to be exposed and I hate the idea of that happening to anyone, however famous, however beautiful or revelatory their writing might have been.
That is why I have no problem with my mission. It doesn’t matter if my friend might have been the Pepys of our age: I shall execute my orders without a peep.
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Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
