joan didion on keeping a notebook essay

Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook

By maria popova.

After citing a seemingly arbitrary vignette she had found scribbled in an old notebook, Didion asks:

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. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. 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. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. […] The point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

To that end, she confesses a lifelong failure at keeping a diary:

I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

What, then, does matter?

How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavillon (one middle-aged man shows his hat check to another and says, ‘That’s my old football number’); impressions of Bettina Aptheker and Benjamin Sonnenberg and Teddy (‘Mr. Acapulco’) Stauffer; careful aperçus about tennis bums and failed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taught me a significant lesson (a lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for ourselves) by asking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchid-filled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it was snowing outside. I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hat-check counter in Pavillon; in fact I suspect that the line ‘That’s my old football number’ touched not my own imagination at all, but merely some memory of something once read, probably ‘The Eighty-Yard Run.’ Nor is my concern with a woman in a dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper in a Wilmington bar. My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point. It is a difficult point to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing. (‘You’re the least important person in the room and don’t forget it,’ Jessica Mitford’s governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inner ear.) 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.

Once again, Didion returns to the egoic driver of the motive to write :

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 talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées ; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.

Ultimately, Didion sees the deepest value of the notebook as a reconciliation tool for the self and all of its iterations:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. […] It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.

The rest of Slouching Towards Bethlehem is brimming with the same kind of uncompromising insight, sharp and soft at the same time, on everything from morality to marriage to self-respect . Complement this particular portion with celebrated writers on the creative benefits of keeping a diary .

— Published November 19, 2012 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/11/19/joan-didion-on-keeping-a-notebook/ —

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Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook

Keeping a notebook or diary is easy to dismiss. I often hear people tell me that it’s OK for other people, but it’s not for them. I always find this stance curious as the habit of keeping a notebook is common amongst exceptional people who not only take the time to report their struggles and feelings but also review them across time. As I was doing research, a friend of mine pointed me towards a Joan Didion essay, On Keeping A Notebook, that appears in Slouching Towards Bethlehem , a collection of her essays.

Written long ago, the 1960s I think, the essay is still relevant today. In fact, you could make an argument that in the world of blogging and twitter, the essay is more relevant than ever.

Reading an arbitrary entry from her notebook, “that woman Estelle is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated today,” Didion goes on to wonder …

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. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. 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. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

The point of keeping a notebook, then:

So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

Recalling her failure to keep a diary, she touches on our ability to shape memories while we codify them.

At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best … 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, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

But if the boredom of daily events doesn’t matter, what does?

How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavillon (one middle-aged man shows his hat check to another and says, ‘That’s my old football number’); impressions of Bettina Aptheker and Benjamin Sonnenberg and Teddy (‘Mr. Acapulco’) Stauffer; careful aperçus about tennis bums and failed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taught me a significant lesson (a lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for ourselves) by asking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchid-filled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it was snowing outside. I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hat-check counter in Pavillon; in fact I suspect that the line ‘That’s my old football number’ touched not my own imagination at all, but merely some memory of something once read, probably ‘The Eighty-Yard Run.’ Nor is my concern with a woman in a dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper in a Wilmington bar. My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point. It is a difficult point to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing.(‘You’re the least important person in the room and don’t forget it,’ Jessica Mitford’s governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inner ear.) 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.

“… not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.” — Joan Didion

I think for Didion, her notebook was an escape. She was “brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, (were) by definition more interesting than (her).” The notebook was an escape.

[O]ur 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.” … [W]e are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.

In the end, the deepest value of notebooks to her was not to remember the line but the memory, “I should remember the woman who said it and the afternoon I heard it.” To reconnect with another iteration of herself. To prevent selective recall

Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing “How High the Moon” on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could even improvise the dialogue.) […] It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.

Notebooks, diaries, journals, or whatever you want to call them are a powerful habit.

Like so much of what I read, I’m new to Didion. Slouching Towards Bethlehem , her first work of non-fiction, is interesting throughout.

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On Keeping a (Writing) Notebook (or Three)

Randon Billings Noble

In her essay “ On Keeping a Notebook, ” Joan Didion writes about the odd notes she has taken over the years – on conversations she has overheard (“That woman Estelle is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated today”), facts she has learned (“during 1964, 720 tons of soot fell on every square mile of New York City”), and observations she has made (“Redhead getting out of car in front of Beverly Wilshire Hotel, chinchilla stole, Vuitton bags with tags reading: MRS LOU FOX / HOTEL SAHARA / VEGAS).  She writes that each note “presumably has some meaning to me …” but admits that she can’t always recall what it is. For her the point is to “[r]emember what it was to be me.”

That’s what I use a journal for – not a notebook. Perhaps these classifications are splitting hairs, but Didion sees a difference, too. She claims that at

no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best. 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?

I would split the hair again and claim that there’s a difference between a diary and a journal – that it’s sort of like the difference between an autobiography and a memoir: in a diary you record each day’s events and in a journal you write whatever you want about your day whenever you want to write about it. For Didion, though, it’s all about the notebook.

I, too, keep a notebook – a writing notebook – and when I mentioned this during a presentation I gave on research in creative nonfiction, a hand in the audience immediately shot up: What did I write in my writing notebook? Some writers are dismissive of these kinds of questions – do you write in a notebook or on a computer, what kind of pen do you use, what kind of paper? But I’m happy to talk about the physical practicalities of craft – I want to know about your Pilot G-2 and your Clairefontaines. And I’m happy to talk about the content, too. When I answered the question many people took notes – perhaps in their writing notebooks. Here’s a version of what I said:

I keep three versions of a writing notebook: a journal, a writing notebook, and a writing planner.

In my journal I write down what happens to me, what I’m thinking about, occasional random observations, lists – the usual stuff you’d write in a journal. But I include this under “writing notebooks” because (especially as a writer of creative nonfiction) I often look back on journals to remember a certain time or place or person or line of thought – although I never write in my journal with this in mind. I write here solely as a person – not a writer.

Here is a journal entry I made on May 11, 2015, after walking through an Elaine de Kooning exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery:

In my “official” writing notebook I jot down ideas for writing projects, make lists for writing projects, and write sketches of writing projects. Often I’ll start writing towards a draft but without any sense of where I’m headed. Writing by hand takes the pressure off: I can’t send ripped-out notebook pages to The New Yorker . But when a piece moves from my notebook to my computer and eventually (sometimes) to publication, I can see that long passages are often exactly the same as when I wrote them by hand the first time.

This is what I wrote in my writing notebook soon after the journal entry above:

Then there’s my writing planner, the newest addition to my series of writing notebooks. It’s a Moleskine “weekly notebook” that has a calendar page laying out the days of the week on the left side and plain lined pages on the right side. I use this for short- and long-term planning. When I hear of a submission, contest, or application deadline I write it down on the calendar side; then I flip back a few weeks (or months) and write a reminder on the notebook side. On Sundays, a day I usually have a long swath of time to myself, I flip to the next week and write some plans. Then, during the week, when I have an hour or two to myself, I open my writing planner and do what it tells me (this is especially useful when the demands of everyday life are so crushing I can’t think straight). If I find that I can’t manage much I flip ahead a week or two and write “don’t forget about [idea]” and try again then. Every so often I flip back to look for unchecked boxes. It’s a lovely tool for preservation – and for looking and planning ahead to, say, a retreat or residency.

Here is a not-so-productive week in my writing planner (with only a deadline reminder for my piece about The Folded Clock ):

And here is a very productive week at the glorious Virginia Center for the Creative Arts :

What would Joan Didion think of all these notebooks? I smile/shudder to think. But my writing notebooks keep me writing – through rejection, triumph, inspiration, and disenchantment; in the face of preschooler twins, tantrums, field trips, and snow days; on the crests and in the troughs; at home and away – all the months of the year.

Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her work has appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times, The Georgia Review, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, Brevity, Fourth Genre and elsewhere. She is a nonfiction editor at r.kv.r.y quarterly , Reviews Editor at Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and a reviewer for The A.V. Club . You can read more of her work at www.randonbillingsnoble.com .

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On Keeping a Notebook by Joan Didion

On Keeping a Notebook by Joan Didion (PDF)

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 talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.

A wonderful essay about the what and why for the author, Joan Didion, of keeping a notebook. Which may be different than the what and why you may have. And it is a point she writes so eloquently about here.

I may have to copy this whole delicious thing into my commonplace book.

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On Keeping A Notebook Essays Summary By Joan Didion

Table of Contents

On Keeping A Notebook Essays Summary By Joan Didion Joan

“ Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook” is an essay written by Joan Didion, a renowned American writer. In this essay, Didion reflects on the importance and significance of keeping a notebook as a means of preserving one’s thoughts, observations, and experiences. 

On Keeping A Notebook Essays Summary By Joan Didion- She explores the ways in which a notebook becomes an extension of the self, a tool for introspection, and a record of the world around us. Through her personal anecdotes and observations, Didion highlights the various purposes and benefits of maintaining a notebook, emphasizing its role in capturing the fleeting moments of life and serving as a source of inspiration for writing.

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On Keeping A Notebook Essays Summary By Joan Didion- Didion begins her essay by recounting her own experience with notebooks, stating that she has been keeping them since she was a child. She describes her notebooks as a form of “impulse control,” a way of making sense of the chaos of life. According to her, a notebook serves as a place to record random thoughts, feelings, and observations that would otherwise be lost to memory. 

On Keeping A Notebook Essays Summary By Joan Didion- It acts as a repository of the self, allowing one to document their own personal history and engage in a process of self-discovery.

The author also addresses the idea of “keeping” a notebook, suggesting that it is not merely a passive act of recording, but an active engagement with the world. She argues that the act of writing in a notebook forces one to pay attention to the details of life, to observe and analyze their surroundings. 

On Keeping A Notebook Essays Summary By Joan Didion- By documenting these observations, the writer gains a deeper understanding of their own experiences and the world at large. Didion suggests that a notebook becomes an instrument of curiosity, encouraging us to engage with the present moment and find meaning in the seemingly mundane.

Throughout the essay, Didion intertwines personal anecdotes with broader reflections on the nature of writing and memory. She discusses the relationship between the past and the present, emphasizing how a notebook allows us to bridge the gap between the two. 

On Keeping A Notebook Essays Summary By Joan Didion- By revisiting past entries, we can rediscover forgotten moments and gain new perspectives on our own lives. Didion argues that the act of writing in a notebook helps us construct narratives and make sense of our experiences, giving coherence to the fragmented nature of memory.

In addition to its personal significance, Didion asserts that a notebook also serves as a valuable tool for writers. She suggests that the act of writing itself is a way of thinking, of processing the world and one’s own emotions. 

On Keeping A Notebook Essays Summary By Joan Didion- By jotting down thoughts and ideas in a notebook, writers can capture the initial spark of inspiration and develop it into something more substantial. Didion emphasizes the importance of capturing the raw material of life and transforming it into art through the act of writing.

Furthermore, Didion explores the concept of self-creation through the act of keeping a notebook. She suggests that by documenting our thoughts and experiences, we are actively constructing our identities. A notebook allows us to reflect on our past selves and witness our growth and evolution over time. 

On Keeping A Notebook Essays Summary By Joan Didion- It serves as a record of our aspirations, fears, and desires, providing insight into the complexities of the human experience.

About Joan Didion

Joan Didion is a highly regarded American writer known for her powerful and insightful works of non-fiction and fiction. She was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California. Didion’s writing style is characterized by its clarity, precision, and introspective nature. She often explores themes such as identity, loss, and the complexities of human nature.

On Keeping A Notebook Essays Summary By Joan Didion- Didion began her writing career as a journalist and worked for various publications, including Vogue and The New York Times. Her journalistic background influenced her distinctive writing style, marked by a keen eye for detail and a willingness to delve into personal experiences.

On Keeping A Notebook Essays Summary By Joan Didion- Some of Didion’s notable works include “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968), a collection of essays that examines the counterculture of the 1960s, and “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), a memoir in which she reflects on the sudden death of her husband and the grief that follows.

On Keeping A Notebook Essays Summary By Joan Didion- Throughout her career, Didion has received numerous awards and accolades for her writing, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Her works continue to be highly regarded for their incisive observations, elegant prose, and introspective exploration of the human condition.

Joan Didion’s writing has had a significant impact on American literature and continues to resonate with readers today. Her unique perspective and insightful observations make her one of the most influential writers of her generation.

Q: What is the main theme of “Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook”?

A: The main theme of “Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook” is the significance of keeping a personal notebook as a tool for self-reflection, capturing moments, and making sense of the world.

Q: What is the purpose of keeping a notebook according to Joan Didion?

A: According to Joan Didion, the purpose of keeping a notebook is to record observations, thoughts, and experiences as a way of understanding oneself and the world. It serves as an extended memory and a means of shaping and interpreting one’s experiences.

Q: How does writing in a notebook help with self-reflection?

A: Writing in a notebook helps with self-reflection by allowing individuals to record their thoughts and emotions. By putting thoughts into words, individuals can gain a better understanding of their own inner life and the complexities of their thoughts and feelings.

Q: What does Joan Didion say about the act of writing in a notebook?

A: Joan Didion suggests that writing in a notebook is a way of creating order and control in a chaotic world. It allows individuals to shape and interpret their experiences and gives them a sense of agency. The act of writing in a notebook also requires observation and attention to detail, which can help preserve memories and capture the essence of a particular time and place.

Q: What does “Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook” teach us about the power of writing?

A: “Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook” teaches us that writing has the power to shape our perception of the world and to create a sense of order and control in our lives. It is a means of self-expression and self-discovery, helping us make sense of our thoughts and emotions. Additionally, writing in a notebook allows us to preserve memories and capture the fleeting moments that often go unnoticed.

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Lady In Read Writes

A blog(ful) of niches, on keeping a notebook.

Week Four of the  Deal Me In Reading Challenge : Another week has gone by already, and month one of the year and decade is already in the past. This week, my card led me to the essay On Keeping a Notebook by Joan Didion.

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On Keeping a Notebook by Joan Didion

I read about Joan Didion for the first time on the brilliant Maria Popova’s BrainPickings. And I knew then I wanted to read her, and about her. But it took many years and this short story reading challenge before I got to reading something by Joan Didion. And I am so glad I did, better late than never, while wondering why I did not do this earlier!

About the Selection and its Author

On Keeping a Notebook is an essay from Joan Didion’s anthology Slouching Towards Bethlehem . The title of the book is inspired by a line from W. B. Yeats poem The Second Coming . This essay, I am sure, has inspired many to, well, keep a notebook themselves.

Joan Didion is an American essayist and novelist. She seemingly pens everything with the same ease – be it a movie script, an essay, romantic thriller, or a memoir, .

My Thoughts

My first thought as I was still reading this was – WOW! She writes with such brilliance! And I was already formulating plans on how to write going forward, and to keep my notebook Didion-style!

My journal writing, or diary or the notebook of today’s post, whatever you call it, has been sporadic at best. I started writing one inspired by Anne Frank as an almost teen. And why did I continue (though I still do that on-again, off-again thing)? And why do so many of us keep a notebook of some sorts?

“ Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point .” — Joan Didion in On Keeping a Notebook from Slouching Towards Bethlehem

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Joan Didion examines all the reasons we write in notebooks in this essay. She reflects that while ‘ The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, ‘ she is not writing to accurately record events or thoughts in her life for, as she says, that ‘ when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best.”

And of course, that is one of the major reasons I have failed in being consistent in keeping my notebook. On days when not much happens, what is the point of keeping that daily journal, I wonder? But then, Didion continues and makes me wonder if I could write in my journal everyday after all when she says, “ instead I tell what some would call lies ,” or “ what it was to me ,” and more importantly, “how it felt to me.”

And as she talks about some previous entries in her notebook about other people, she reflects momentarily “ that the notebook is about other people.” since after all we are all “expected .. to affect absorption in other people’s” clothes or etc.

But she says that no matter what or who else we talk about, there is one thing that shines through in all our notebook entries, and that is “I” . All those random thoughts and entries are supposed to mean something only to the “ I ” who noted them down (not always though as she says, that some entries make us wonder why we wrote them in the first place).

Then she makes an observation that I truly enjoyed reading.

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. …… I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be;….

…….. It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about.”

And I realized that even those seemingly meaningless entries I made in my diary of years ago and those heavier more meaningful ones – they are all parts of all those people I used to be, and help me be me every day, hopefully a better one, today and every tomorrow as well.

For all of you who are journalists or diarists or notebook-keepers (or are thinking about it) or simply enjoy a good short read, read this one. As for me, while this might be my first Didion read, it certainly is not going to be the last one! I might as well read the rest of Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and then maybe go for the whole collection – seven Didion books in one mega-volume titled We Tell Ourselves Stories to Live: Collected Nonfiction .

And, Yes, the End of this Post:

So dear reader, do you keep a notebook? Why and how often, if you do? And what are your favorite ways to keep one – online, electronic, or any notebook or a beautiful journal? And if you don’t, do you plan to?

Since this is technically making up for the January challenge, here are my previous posts.

• Inspire Your HeArt
• Book Review: I’m Stretched
• Wordless Wednesday: Puzzles for National Puzzle Day
• Tiny Travelers Series: Picture Book Reviews
• Sunday Scribblings #23: Make it Count
• Blog(ger)s That Make My Day
• Deal Me In #3: Cathedral by Raymond Carver
• Picture Book Review: Old Man of the Sea
• 10 Recent Additions to My Bookshelf
• 5 Reasons to Reach Out and Hug
• Deja vu? Golden Shovel Revisited
• Sunday Scribblings #22: A Week That Showed What Time Is
• Picture Book Review: Don’t Let the Beasties Escape this Book
• Another Challenge: Blog Audit Challenge 2020
• A Very Short-Short Story: Last Long Night
• Book Review: Tweet Cute by Emma Lord
• Sunday Scribblings #21: When Sundays Tumble into Tuesdays
• Mini Reviews: Picture Books
• Life is a Circus
• How Impressions Transcend Time
• My Lit List: 3 Free Reading Websites for Kids
• The Rocking Horse Winner
• Sunday Scribblings #20: In the Year 2020, We Will
• 2020 Reading Challenges – Join the Fun!
• Resolution – a firm decision to do or not to do something
• A Resolution To Keep the Resolutions We Make
• On the First Day of the Decade, My …

17 thoughts on “ On Keeping a Notebook ”

Interesting blog. I don’t keep an actual journal but jot things down in my planner. I also always have a notebook on my bedstand when ideas come inmy head at the middle of the night.

thank you Martha.. i jot down ideas too, but i unfortunately don’t do that in one place so now i need to figure out where they are:)

I’ve never kept a journal. I used to carry a notebook with me in case I had blogging ideas on the go. Now I use my phone.

Hi Lady in Read, Joan Didion is one of those authors whose name keeps coming up for me and always leaves me wanting to get serious about reading some of her work. We had a DMI participant one year who read a LOT of Didion’s work, and I had a book club that read a non-fiction book where the author is constantly referring to her reading Didion, so I need to read her soon I guess. 🙂

I liked your post a lot and how deep a dive you took with this short non-fiction piece. For my part I’ve never really kept a literary journal. Back when I was taking chess very seriously and playing in a lot of tournaments, I kept a journal of what I was studying and the “stories” of my games, so to speak, but that was almost thirty years ago(!) now. At present, I don’t feel like I have the time to write something every day, but I’m sure some introspective writing is “good for the soul.” I also feel like one can be TOO introspective, so it’s probably a delicate balance. 🙂

Definitely sounds very helpful. Glad you had a chance to read it.

I’ve kept a journal here and there throughout my life, but never stuck with anything long term. I like the idea of this book. Great post!

I have never been successful in keeping a personal journal

I love my notebook and I write almost every day. Nothing fancy, but something or the other. I might have to read that one soonl.

I have been a fan of writing practice (daily writing in a notebook) for years AND I must say there were times when I was less regular. This year I have been exceptional, actually since December. I love reading my old notebooks – it is like Didion says, I see myself for who I was then even more clearly than my old blogs or poetry tell me because it is in my hand!

I also frequently share my notebooks on Instagram, People compliment my handwriting which always amuses me. Sometimes I make short videos for the same reason. I’ve been doing a lot of work on my vision so my notebooks have a lot more work focus these days and actually, it feels really good.

PS – My most recent posts are, I suppose technically make up posts, but I enjoyed the Ultimate Blog Challenge community so much I am going to just keep showing up, make up or not! I hope you will, too!

I don’t use a journal but that is a good idea.

Great post, thank you so much for sharing your awesome post.

Isn’t that what my blog is for, Vidya? The only notebook I have kept (other than my diary that ceased being “mine” 55 years ago) has been my lab notebook!

🙂 True, this blog is my journal (of sorts, since not all those thoughts make it here!!) Lab notebooks – that brings back lots of memories for me …

I have been maintaining notebooks for over half a decade. Writing in it is an important part of my day! Thank you for sharing this essay, will have to read it in depth.

I am all too familiar with the compulsion of impulsive writing. It is why I have maintained notebooks for almost half a decade. Thank you for sharing this!

thanks Ravmeet… got and approved all your comments..

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On keeping a notebook, part 1, first person.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

Photograph courtesy of the author.

When I decided to move to New York to pursue writing, I took all of the notebooks I’d kept in high school out back of my apartment and burned them on the sidewalk separating my building from my neighbor’s. I didn’t use an accelerant because I expected the paper to burn easily, for the whole pile to go up in flames at the toss of a single match. Instead, I sat on the sidewalk with book after book of matches, tearing the notebooks apart and crumpling them, holding individual pages over the flames so they would catch, watching the spiral bindings blacken but persevere into the eventual pile of ashes and scraps of brown paper left behind an hour later. When my roommate came home, she told me what I’d done was stupid.

I’ve kept a notebook since elementary school. Back then, I called it a diary because that’s what my friend Christina called hers. I remember her reading me accounts of eating hot dogs, meeting a cute boy, doing homework: “factual” records of events that were, whether or not important, beats on which to hang memories. I fashioned my diary after Christina’s but eventually grew bored and abandoned it. I didn’t see the point; I didn’t yet know what it meant to record the story of my inner life. I had a completely different relationship with my inner life then. There wasn’t a sense of anxiety around the need to find words for those things I was thinking and feeling. That anxiety came a few years later, in middle school, when my social life took a downturn and I started to keep a notebook again. The first thing I wrote was a song, the lyrics and melody for which are lost forever, as is the notebook.

Most of my childhood notebooks are lost–begun in a state of excitement but half- or quarter-filled and abandoned after a few weeks. It wasn’t until high school that I began to think about my notebooks as things that needed to be preserved. In Florida, when I took four years of notebooks outside and burned them, I thought of the act as a ritual cleansing. I was shedding my past in order to recreate myself in the present. If there wasn’t a record of it, I thought, the past no longer existed. Or rather, if there wasn’t a record of it, the past could be whatever I needed it to be; could return to a state of raw material to be molded and rearranged, refashioned into new stories, better stories, the stories I wanted to tell, and not the stories that were most accurate.

Whatever “accuracy” meant. Accuracy has very little, if anything, to do with keeping a notebook. Case in point: I took a vacation with my husband’s family recently, a week after I began my most recent notebook. I decided I needed to gain some perspective on notebook-keeping if I was going to start writing about it, so I brought the first volume of Susan Sontag’s journals with me. Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947–1963 begins when Sontag is sixteen and about to begin her first year at UC Berkeley. To her credit, even at sixteen she’s far more articulate than I am now. But there are large gaps of time between entries, and entries that consist only of reflections on certain writers and philosophers, and some that are made up of the beginnings of stories, and in one case, only a list of seemingly unrelated words. With so many different kinds of writing and periods of time passing between, how can these notebooks be called in any way “accurate”? What would a notebook accurately or inaccurately portray?

What is a notebook for , anyway?

I began this most recent notebook with the idea that I had lost touch with what it meant to keep a notebook. The last six or seven I’ve kept, covering the span of about three years, have consisted mostly of notes from classes and brainstormed ideas for pieces I was writing. There are few personal entries, and certainly no accounts of daily events. Then again, does a notebook need accounts of daily events in order to be “personal”? An entry from August 2012 reads:

Grandpa Videos

VID00013                                                            March 6

In March 2011, I visited my grandparents in Cleveland and brought a FlipCam with me that I used to interview them. My grandfather was dying of cancer, a horrible disease that he succumbed to the following August after years of suffering. After he died, my family asked me to make CD-ROMs of the videos for them to take home. We sat together at the table where my grandmother used to play bridge with her friends once a week, and watched all the videos together on my computer. The entry goes on like this for another two columns. While it’s not a summary of events, it still succeeds in bringing back the memory of that day.

So maybe that’s what a notebook is for? Memories? But then how do I account for the very next entry?

Q to Harold Sq.

Switch to R?

Get off R at 57 th St.

56 th St. towards Broadway

211 W 56 th St 30G

Is Anita someone I knew once? A restaurant? A store? Actually, Anita is the analyst I saw for a few months after my grandfather died, but I only remember this now because I googled the address and looked at the street view. If I hadn’t done that, Anita would have forever remained a disembodied name with a mysterious Midtown address. This whole spread reminds me of something Joan Didion says in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook”:

We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structured conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees ; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.

For the last two years, my notebooks have been largely places wherein I stage ideas before writing them in a finished form. Flipping through their pages, I see notes about Gerald Murnane, Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst, and other writers whose work I critiqued for literary journals. When I went to Florida for a month to write my novel, I bought a brand new, five-topic Mead notebook and filled the whole thing with notes about the birth and death of stars, character arcs, and veganarchism. A few times, I wrote letters to my friends and ripped them out, leaving bits of paper behind inside the spiral. I like to imagine that someday, a conscientious biographer will collect my letters from the far reaches of the country and include them in an edition titled something like: Reassembled: Notebooks and Letters 1985—?.

Which brings me to my next point: What if somebody reads my notebooks? It is a distinct fear that I had to overcome before beginning this latest one. I was deliberate in treating this as a return to my style of keeping notebooks in the past: a place where I would write about my own life, and begin stories, and write down impressions of people I saw on the street, and lines of poems, and quotes, and secrets. It was to be a much more personal endeavor; a writer’s notebook —a place of interest for posterity, and not just a collection of academic fragments and ideas about other writers’ work.

The first few pages are tentative. It took me a long time to write them: several hours spent sitting in a café using several different pens. I had chosen the notebook carefully after considering many options; there were rules about how durable it had to be, how broad the pages, how tall the lines (it had to be lined). I looked at different brands: Rollbahn (an old favorite), Leuchtturm, Moleskine, Rite in the Rain. I didn’t want something with a hard back (although this is ultimately what I ended up with). I didn’t want something too small because I was afraid it wouldn’t encourage longer entries. At the same time, I didn’t want something too large because it would be difficult to carry in a smaller bag. I ended up with a medium-sized, brown, faux-leather Leuchtturm with a pocket in the back for holding photographs.

My hand was tired at the end of four pages.

Sarah Gerard is a writer and a bookseller. Her fiction, criticism, and personal essays have appeared in the New York Times , the Los Angeles Review of Books , BOMB ,  Slice magazine, and other publications. Her journalism has appeared in the Tampa Bay Times . She earned her MFA at the New School.

Kelly Danckert

Just another umass boston blogs site.

“On Keeping a Notebook”

September 9, 2015 by kellydanckert001 | 0 comments

Joan Didion’s essay opens on an incredibly personal note: a confession of sorts of why she and who the reader assumes to be her significant other, broke up. It’s a snapshot of her life at a single moment in time; a single sentence accompanied by the date and where Didion was when she wrote it. The reader is left with questions Didion goes on to ask her. What was she doing in Delaware? “Waiting for a train, missing a train?” As Carl H. Klaus points out in his piece “Essayists on the Essay,” Didion’s essay is personal, free, and unfolds slowly and in a way that mimics how she is processing the information she’s writing about.

Didion goes on to answer a broader question: why keep a notebook? The way she answers this questions, however, reflects the characteristics of the essay that Klaus talks about. Didion could have made this piece a persuasive one, where she talks about the reasons people should keep a notebook or she could have made it more like an article where she writes about the benefits of keeping a notebook. Instead, she answers the questions as she’s mulling it over herself. The essay isn’t set up in a way that is a purposeful, methodical exploration of the subject, it’s simply an exploration of her thoughts.

After listing off some potential personal reasons for keeping a notebook, Didion seems to reach a conclusion. She says, “So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking.” The way she writes makes it seem as though she came to this conclusion through writing about it. It wasn’t an answer she found by thinking about it beforehand and then deciding to write it down, but instead by working through it with words and internal musings.

This is one of the main distinctions Klaus makes between an article and an essay. He says there is a “personal orientation of the essay and the factual mode of the article.” He goes on to say the article is “out of touch with human concerns.”

The driving force behind Didion’s piece “On Keeping a Notebook” is her voice and personal connection throughout. The narrative is freer, more open, and consists more of impressions and thoughts than fact. It is this personal voice and casual exploration of why she chooses to keep a notebook that is one of the defining traits of an essay that Klaus explains in his piece.

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• On Keeping A Notebook by Joan Didion

In “ Slouching Toward Bethlehem ” by Joan Didion, we find the brilliant and prolific writer’s essay On Keeping A Notebook . As an avid notebook keeper, I find her observations and self-awareness about the process and results of this obsessive habit both humorous and inciteful. Written over 50 years ago, her words still ring true today, whether it’s observations in a notebook or posts on social media and blogs. The events we write about and our recollections of them are merely our interpretation of them, and more about experiencing them than accurately documenting them.

Here are a few of my favorite excerpts… You can find a copy of the entire essay here .

“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 talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”

“I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.”

“How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavillon (one middle-aged man shows his hat check to another and says, ‘That’s my old football number’); impressions of Bettina Aptheker and Benjamin Sonnenberg and Teddy (‘Mr. Acapulco’) Stauffer; careful aperçus about tennis bums and failed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taught me a significant lesson (a lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for ourselves) by asking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchid-filled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it was snowing outside. I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hat-check counter in Pavillon; in fact I suspect that the line ‘That’s my old football number’ touched not my own imagination at all, but merely some memory of something once read, probably ‘The Eighty-Yard Run.’ Nor is my concern with a woman in a dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper in a Wilmington bar. My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point. “

“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. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. 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. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. “

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6 responses to “ On Keeping A Notebook by Joan Didion ”

I like her a lot! ❤️

Me too!! So glad you stopped by!

What interesting thoughts. 😀 And thank you for sharing your experience, I’ve never seen an osprey. 😀

So glad you enjoyed it! And ospreys are one of my favorite birds…they are so majestic! Thank you! -Nancy

This is great Bersinink. Your intro rang true for me. I laughed recently looking back through an old notebook of mine. I’m not sure how accurate my notes were, but they definitely drew me back to the event and helped me rewrite the event in my own thinking. I was able to go back in time and see things quickly the way I remembered. Did things really happen the way I remembered . . . probably not, but I could taste and feel it with no problems. Ha, ha.

I love that Brian! Sometimes I reread some things I’d written and wondered about my “interpretation ” of certain events…but it does take you right back there. Glad you enjoyed! -Nancy

To make living itself an art, that is the goal. - Henry Miller

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JOAN DIDION

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not..

From the essay “On Keeping a Notebook” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

ABOUT   |   QUOTES   |   BOOKS   |   NEWS   |   ARCHIVE

Photo: Jerry Bauer

1934–2021

About joan didion.

Joan Didion was a journalist, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and screenwriter who wrote some of the sharpest and most evocative analyses of culture, politics, literature, family, and loss. She won the National Book Award in 2005 for The Year of Magical Thinking .

THE ARCHIVE

The new york public library acquires the papers of joan didion and john gregory dunne.

JOAN DIDION BOOKS

   biography & memoir  .

   ESSAYS  

   FICTION  

   WORLD POLITICS  

THE NATIONWIDE BESTSELLER

Let me tell you what i mean.

With a foreword by Hilton Als, these pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure. They showcase Joan Didion’s incisive reporting, her empathetic gaze, and her role as “an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time” ( The New York Times Book Review ).

  THE LATEST  

JANUARY 27, 2023

New york public library acquires joan didion’s papers.

The joint archive of Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, includes manuscripts, photographs, letters, dinner party guest lists and other personal items.

NEW YORK TIMES  »

MEMORIAL SERVICE

A celebration of the life of joan didion.

On September 21, 2022, the Cathedral Church of Saint John Divine hosted a celebration of Joan Didion’s life and work.

Joan Didion’s Estate Is Heading to Auction

By Jessica Ritz

ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST  »

Joan Didion Talks to Hari Kunzru About Loss, Blue Nights, and Giving Up the Yellow Corvette

By Hari Kunzru

LITERARY HUB  »

Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking

By Zadie Smith

THE NEW YORKER  »

Joan Didion’s Magic Trick

By Caitlin Flanagan

THE ATLANTIC  »

Our Lady of Deadpan

By Darryl Pinckney

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS  »

Remembering Essayist Joan Didion, a Keen Observer of American Culture

By Terry Gross

NPR | FRESH AIR  »

Didion’s Prophetic Eye on America

By Michiko Kakutani

Joan Didion and the Voice of America

By Hilton Als

The Radical Transparency of Joan Didion

By Frank Bruni

THE DOCUMENTARY

The center will not hold.

Joan Didion reflects on her remarkable career and personal struggles in this intimate documentary directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne.

PBS NEWSHOUR

Remembering joan didion.

“She captured moments in American culture with penetrating clarity and style,” says PBS News Hour’s Jeffrey Brown in this remembrance of the life and work of Joan Didion.

Gathered here are some of the files, photographs, manuscripts, notes, book jackets, and other items connected to Joan Didion’s life and legacy. We’re making this remarkable body of work accessible to everyone and will be adding stories and galleries as new items become available.

Remembering Joan Didion’s reserved, masterful style

The power of Didion’s prose lay in what she didn’t say.

by Constance Grady

Joan Didion, the writer whose reporting on the California of the 1960s was a landmark of New Journalism, died on Thursday in her Manhattan home at 87 years old. With this death, America is losing one of its greatest prose stylists in living memory.

Didion wrote prose as clean and precise as a steel blade: It cut, but only what she meant to cut. As a child, she used to retype Hemingway’s chapters so that she could see how his sentences worked (Bret Easton Ellis later did the same thing with Didion’s work), but she had an austere elegance all her own. She was a master of argument through style; she rarely built out a formal thesis and supporting points, but would instead put her ideas across through a series of anecdotes, so carefully observed and beautifully rendered that the argument seemed to emerge from the negative space created by what Didion didn’t actually say. She didn’t need to say it.

One of the most striking examples of Didion’s sparse and evocative prose comes in her 1966 essay “ On Keeping a Notebook .” Didion begins characteristically, with an anecdote drawn from her notebook — a woman in a “dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper” complaining to a bored bartender about another woman named Estelle on an August morning in Wilmington. “Why did I write it down?” she asks. Why is she so compelled to keep a notebook, and why does she choose to write down the things that she does in it?

Didion swiftly dismisses the idea that she keeps her notebook to gather material for her work. While she sometimes allows herself to imagine that this might be the case, and that “some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write - on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest,” she concludes that this idea is merely a fantasy. She is not, she admits, really interested in the people she describes when she writes about them in her notebook. She is interested in herself, observing those other people.

This self-interest is the standard knock on Didion from her critics, who charge that she reports not on the world but on her own graceful sensibility. As Barbara Grizzuti Harrison put it in 1980 , “Her subject is always herself.”

“It is a difficult point to admit,” admits Didion in “On Keeping a Notebook”: that “however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’” But what makes Didion’s work so effective is that through her terse and allusive style, she is able to extrapolate out from her own implacable I into a mood, an aura, an emotional sense that everyone else’s I can recognize and latch onto. And that, in the end, seems to be what Didion is practicing in her notebooks: this extrapolation, this creation of tone from anecdote.

Didion herself concludes that she writes her notebooks in order to “keep on nodding terms” with the people she used to be, so that later she can go back to them and recognize herself at 17, at 23. But the way she stays on nodding terms is by jotting down observations that will jolt her back into the sense of how it felt for her to be a certain version of herself — and those anecdotes seem to have the same effect on the rest of us, too.

Didion denies the charge. “We are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you,” she writes. “ ‘So what’s new in the whiskey business?’ What could that possibly mean to you?” But then she tells us what it means to her:

To me it means a blonde in a Pucci bathing suit sitting with a couple of fat men by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Another man approaches, and they all regard one another in silence for a while. “So what’s new in the whiskey business?” one of the fat men finally says by way of welcome, and the blonde stands up, arches one foot and dips it in the pool looking all the while at the cabana where Baby Pignatari is talking on the telephone. That is all there is to that, except that several years later I saw the blonde coming out of Saks Fifth Avenue in New York with her California complexion and a voluminous mink coat. In the harsh wind that day she looked old and irrevocably tired to me, and even the skins in the mink coat were not worked the way they were doing them that year, not the way she would have wanted them done, and there is the point of the story. For a while after that I did not like to look in the mirror, and my eyes would skim the newspapers and pick out only the deaths, the cancer victims, the premature coronaries, the suicides, and I stopped riding the Lexington Avenue IRT because I noticed for the first time that all the strangers I had seen for years - the man with the seeing-eye dog, the spinster who read the classified pages every day, the fat girl who always got off with me at Grand Central - looked older than they once had.

So what’s new in the whiskey business means mortality. It means that we all get old and die, and that it’s awful to think about. Didion knows how to put that basic truth across, to evoke its grim horror, purely with the precision of her anecdotes. She doesn’t need to say it plainly. She put it into the negative space.

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Why it's important to keep a notebook

It is a good idea to keep in touch with old selves, Joan Didion once wrote

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I've been doing some research into notebooks and the like. A friend of mine pointed me towards a Joan Didion essay, "On Keeping A Notebook," that appears in Slouching Towards Bethlehem , a collection of her essays.

Written long ago, in the 1960s I think, the essay is still relevant. In fact, you could make an argument that in the world of blogging and Twitter, it's more relevant than ever.

Reading an arbitrary entry from her notebook, "that woman Estelle is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated today," Didion goes on to wonder:

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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. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. 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. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. [Slouching Towards Bethlehem]

The point of keeping a notebook, then:

So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. [Slouching Towards Bethlehem]

Recalling her failure to keep a keep a diary she touches on our ability to shape memories while we codify them.

At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day's events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best… [Slouching Towards Bethlehem]

But if the boredom of daily events doesn't matter, what does?

I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavillon...

I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hat-check counter in Pavillon... My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point. [Slouching Towards Bethlehem]

I think for Didion her notebook was an escape. She was "brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, (were) by definition more interesting than (her)." The notebook was an escape.

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[O]ur 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." … [W]e are talking about something private, about bits of the mind's string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker. [Slouching Towards Bethlehem]

In the end the deepest value of notebooks to her was not to remember the line but the memory, "I should remember the woman who said it and the afternoon I heard it." To reconnect with another iteration of herself.

Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing "How High the Moon" on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could even improvise the dialogue.)

…It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you. [Slouching Towards Bethlehem]

Like so much of what I read, I'm new to Didion. Slouching Towards Bethlehem , her first work of non-fiction, is interesting throughout.

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