On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
Joan Didion reflects on the personal and introspective nature of keeping a notebook, delving into memory, self-reflection, and the significance of past experiences.
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On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
Keepers of private notebooks are a differ ent breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores.
Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout.
Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
And so we do. But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talk ing here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consump tion, a structural conceit for binding together a series of grace... See more
Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
“our notebooks give us away” - good title for an essay
But sometimes the point is harder to discern. What exactly did I have in mind when I noted down that it cost the father of someone I know $650 a month to light the place on the Hudson in which he lived before the Crash? What use was I planning to make of this line by Jimmy Hoffa: 6 “I may have my faults, but being wrong ain’t one of them”? And al t... See more
Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
when the point is harder to discern (but she still shows us the way there)
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly com pulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only acciden tally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.
Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
love how Didion just sneaks profound bombs into her writing cuz they don’t insist on themselves bc they’re so woven into the prose that’s moving fast forward
In fact I have abandoned altogether that kind of pointless entry; instead I tell what some would call lies. “That’s simply not true,” the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event. “The party was not for you, the spider was not a black widow, it wasn’t that way at all .” Very likely they are right... See more
Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
“did snow”
I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up.
Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
What is this business about “shopping, typing piece, dinner with E, depressed”? Shopping for what? Typing what piece? Who is E? Was this “E” depressed, or was I depressed? Who cares?
Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
Who cares? - good question to ask in an essay about this piece