On Not Keeping A Notebook — Until Now

I was never a journaler. Now I’m a blogger.

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. — Joan Didion, On Keeping A Notebook

The above is from the classic Joan Didion essay On Keeping A Notebook. The essay can be found in Didion’s even more classic 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the timelessness of which applies not just to the legacy of the essay and the book but also to the trappings and driving sentiment of the prose. As with so much of Didion’s work, the aesthetic immediacy of the moment overrides the actual truth. (I say this as Didion’s biggest fan and stylistic copycat.) As lyrical as the notion may be, I do not believe that keepers of notebooks are an especially neurotic lot.

I, for one, am an anxious malcontent who has never kept a notebook. Whenever I’ve wondered why this is so, I’ve always come back to an answer that is so fundamentally unsatisfying as to be shameful: I couldn’t be bothered. Even as a little girl, when I wrote stories with such a fury that one weekend (according to a story my mother told for decades) I used up every scrap of paper in the household and started writing on bathroom tissue (like a prison…