Response to On Keeping a Notebook

Nina Wan

In the essay “On Keeping a Notebook” by Joan Didion, she talks about a private journal she kept as a child. In the essay, the question of what compels us to draw down certain moments comes up over and over again. Surprisingly, Didion continues to contradict and negate herself on the intention of she keeping a private notebook. After citing a small piece of irrelevant note Didion recorded in her notebook, she wonders: “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?” As a diary keeper, I often go back to the question of what propels myself to write down the things that I wrote. Will I care about “the banana milk was to sweet, Feb. 2,”  or “gained three pounds over the winter break, 2016,” let’s say, three years from now? Will I even be eager to look for this notebook in a unnoticeable corner in my house in the future of my life? Although the Didion essay was written by her decades ago, the insight and this uncertainty of why note-keeping, Instagraming, or face booking still applies to many modern hearts. “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.” Therefore, Didion confesses more than one time in the essay that her doing of keeping a diary was a failure in some way. It is also difficult for the trust her memories from her diary for the audience sometimes as her confession went along, for instance: “Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else del the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.”

The quote that left me the deepest impression was when Didion said “We are brought up in the ethic that others, any other, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves.” That might be true, uncertain, but our private words often give us away just like Didion mentioned, “for how ever dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I’.” Once more, the author returns to the core question: Why write? Eventually, Didion finally sees the very deep value of her private notebook as a reconciliation tool for the “self” and a passage to remind us of the passed times and people, perhaps the “present moments” we recorded down no longer matter.

Citations:

1 Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook, Slouching Towards Bethlehem,1968, pg 132

2 Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook, Slouching Towards Bethlehem,1968, pg 134

3 Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook, Slouching Towards Bethlehem,1968, pg 134

4 Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook, Slouching Towards Bethlehem,1968, pg 136