Other girls kept diaries in little pink, leather-bound books with a gold lock and key. I kept a journal in a serviceable notebook that would tell anyone who saw me bent over it, scribbling away, that I was no casual writer. The summer I was eleven, I wrote, “to catch the thoughts as they flow” on the cover of my notebook and set it in a duffel bag beside my camp uniform. I was not interested in a diary about boys and parties, with a cover marked “private” or “keep out.” I hoped to be a real writer one day.
Trinity Mountain Camp for Girls was run by the Sisters of Saint Margaret, an order of Episcopal nuns. In 1967, when their Catholic counterparts were shedding the habit and going out into the world in the flush of post–Vatican II freedom, these nuns remained covered from head to toe in wimple, veil, and black robes that brushed the grass as they strode toward the chapel in the ninety-degree heat. We were in awe of those severe women, not only of their ability to withstand the heat in so many layers of cloth, but also of their single-minded devotion to a religious calling. Some of the more devout campers joined the nuns for their private service of Compline. Other girls spoke of becoming nuns themselves. I was not among them. Though I loved the cadence of the prayers and the ritual of the services in the small chapel where we sat pressed close together in plain wooden pews, I was aware even then that I had another calling. My religion was writing.
While the other girls played foursquare on the blacktop outside the rec hall before lunch, I could be found under a tree, my journal propped in my lap, writing poems. I did not personally know any writers, but instinctively I had stumbled on the idea of keeping a journal, because I realized that this is what writers must do. I was not yet able to write whole pages that might add up to a story or (glory of glories) an entire book. The most I could sustain were bits of poems, random collections of lines, short reflections. The concept of finishing a piece of writing, taking it through successive drafts, did not yet exist for me. I reveled in the heady pleasure of committing a few words to paper and treasured each like a rare jewel I had dug from the earth with my bare hands. A journal suited my fledgling status as a writer and made me feel serious and important, a real writer, and honored the scant output I produced. In my journal I practiced being a writer in both senses of the word: practiced as in trying out, and practiced as in keeping a daily practice, the way the nuns observed their daily order of prayer services.
From an early age, I was a passionate and constant reader, far more interested in curling up on the couch with a good book than in going outside to play. I adored words and what words arranged on a page could accomplish in the mind of a reader, painting vivid pictures, conjuring up exotic places, and making imagined people come to life with a force that real, live people often seemed to lack. At the same time, writing was what I used to separate myself from others, to define myself as different, and the notebook with the brown cardboard cover that served as my journal was the potent symbol of what set me apart. There was arrogance in this, and a determined longing.
From the start of my efforts to become a writer, I had a love / hate relationship with the whole business. I wanted more than anything to be seen as someone with a special talent that marked me as one of the chosen few who had risen from the ranks of the ordinary. I also wanted, desperately, to be accepted and liked, to belong and be included in the gang.
These two desires fought with each other at constant odds, a split in my nature that persists to this day. For a shy, skinny, and awkward girl, writing was a good place to hide. In the pages of my journal, I took comfort in the power of the words that I alone could fashion. The making of a private world in words sustained me and in a strange way protected me from the terrors of the rough and tumble world of people. Yet the very thing that appeared to be my salvation, giving a quiet girl who lived in her mind much of the time a way to be, set me further apart from others, exacerbating my sense of isolation. The journal in which I first practiced being a writer came to be a talisman of this fundamental divide in my character.
For Christmas one year when I was a teenager, my father gave me an old piece of sheet music he had found in an antique store. The song was titled “All Alone,” and the cover featured a blurry black-and-white photograph of a young woman holding a hand to her breast and gazing mournfully into the distance. The gift was meant to be a playful joke. Everyone laughed when I ripped apart the wrapping paper and revealed the dreamy-eyed woman. “I thought she looked like you,” my father said. He was right; the woman did bear a resemblance to me, or at least what I might have looked like had I been living in the 1920s. But the laughter of my mother and sisters came from recognition, not only of the long, thin lines of the woman’s face, but also of the appropriateness of the song’s title. I was “all alone,” and spent hours in my bedroom reading and writing or up in the attic gazing out at the city rooftops stretching away to a slice of river.
In a picture taken of me when I was fifteen, I am standing on a lawn next to the building where we lived in a baggy pair of corduroy pants and a denim jacket, my frizzy hair hanging past my shoulders, the image of an early 1970s hippie child. In my hand I am holding a plain brown notebook—my journal. I was not all alone, because I took my journal with me everywhere, along with a camera. Photography became my other passion, and my journal and my camera became my means of capturing my experience of the world in a crafted form. My photographs and my journal pages were aimed at art, but I understood even then that the journals were not art. They were the trail markers for the art I would one day make.
In college, I continued to write sporadically in my journal, but I did not take any writing classes. Though writing remained a secret love, with the journal as my silent companion, I believed I might be headed for a career in photography. One night in the fall of my junior year, attempting to write a history paper in the stacks of the library, I became so bored that I picked up a stray copy of the college catalogue lying at the end of a nearby bookshelf. I sat and actually read the thing, and in doing so, discovered the existence of the New England Literature Program, or NELP as I would affectionately come to call it.
For six weeks in the spring, NELP took some thirty undergraduates to live in a camp on Lake Winnipesauke in New Hampshire. Guided by two wonderfully eccentric English professors, we read Thoreau, Dickinson, Emerson, and Hawthorne. Classes were conducted on the dock overlooking the lake or up in the field behind the cabins. We spent three days a week hiking in the White Mountains, and we were required to keep a journal of the whole experience. In their wisdom, our professors understood that academic papers would not suit the program, where reading the poetry of Robert Frost was of a piece with hiking the New England woods.
I came to NELP already a journal writer, but I left with a renewed and relentless passion for the blank pages in those blank notebooks. For the first time, I knew other people who kept journals and saw my journal as a recognized and legitimate form of writing. For the first time, I let someone else read my journal. Though we were allowed to mark pages of a personal nature we did not want read, I shared just about everything with my professors in my unabashed enthusiasm, causing them some embarrassment. They overlooked my too frank accounts of one unrequited crush and another brief affair. I am still in touch with one of the professors, now retired. He tells me that my NELP journals hold a record for being among the longest of any student’s in the more than thirty years of the program’s existence.
The permission I was given by my NELP teachers not only to write, but also to write in a journal, came at a key moment in my life and shaped me in ways that made a lasting difference. Halfway through the six weeks, when one of my professors read the pages I had written, he returned my journals with a handwritten letter that said, “Lurking behind these journal entries is an autobiographical novel of power and interest.” Becoming a writer was no longer my private, secret dream. Someone else saw the possibility and believed in it, too. My NELP professors were on the cutting edge in the mid-1970s of using journals in the “classroom.” Today the practice is ubiquitous, with everyone from first graders to graduate students routinely keeping journals of one sort or another. But when I went off to the New Hampshire woods, journaling was not yet an established trend in America. It came as a revelation to discover the value in the battered notebooks I had lugged around since I was eleven.
In the years that followed that first sanctioned experience of being a journal writer, I filled notebook after notebook. My journal accompanied me through the last year of college, when I was working in a camera store as I tried to figure out what came next, on a two-month trip around Europe with a Eurail pass, and through graduate school. In my journal I recorded the inconceivable loss of a young friend to cancer, the attempts to find love, my nightly dreams, and quotes from writers I admired. Though I wrote regularly and often at great length, with single entries taking up ten or more handwritten pages, my journal remained primarily a record of my emotional states, a place to write down thoughts and feelings rather than events. I became, like all writers, an observer of my own life, yet the life I was interested in observing was largely an internal one, the things I could not voice to others but reveled in voicing to myself.
To believe that you have something to say that the world is just waiting to hear, and that no one else can say it in quite the way you can, is self-centered, to say the least. But this is what we ask of artists, that they make a journey into the self and return to tell us what they have found. We are grateful to artists of all types (musicians, painters, dancers, actors) for spending the time in reflection, thought, and creative engagement, and then sharing the results. From early on in my practice of being a journal writer, I saw myself embarking on such a journey, traveling into the self and making a map of those uncharted depths. Here, I believed, was my best work. One day my journals would prove to be a lasting (dare I say brilliant?) record of a young woman’s coming of age in the latter half of the twentieth century.
In many ways, my journals are my best work, though not as I once thought, for the intrinsic value of the pages themselves. By keeping a journal, I learned to be an observer of my own emotions and shifts in thinking and belief. I learned to look for patterns in my responses to my experiences. I came to understand myself as a being who changed over time. Writing an account of the ways I continually surprised and disappointed myself, of how I made the same mistakes over and over, of how I refused to learn the very lessons I set out to teach myself in my journal, made me question bedrock assumptions about myself. I was forced to acknowledge in the pages of my journal the gap between knowing something and being able to act on it. I was constantly reminded of my own flawed nature, of the essential blindness, willfulness, and selfishness that make us all human. This practice of trying to truly know and understand myself was what I drew on most when I began to write novels.
Twenty years after I received a master’s degree in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins, I published my first book. For a long, long time (as it felt to me), I met strangers on airplanes and at parties and told them I was a writer and then had to respond to the inevitable question, “What have you published?” Nothing (or next to nothing)—a couple of short stories in little magazines that folded shortly after publishing my work didn’t count. I was writing throughout these years, working on drafts of three different novels, and producing short stories and occasional poems. I was writing in my journal, page after handwritten page detailing my struggles with the novels and short stories, my discouragement and my fervent hope. My journal, more than anything else, carried me through these years, confirming on all those scrawled pages that I was, indeed, a writer.
After my first novel was published, I had the startling experience of hearing my work described by others who were not fellow writers in a writing workshop. Reviewers noted the sense of atmosphere and setting in my books. Readers at book events in bookstores and libraries spoke about the characters. These people put my writing in a context and named the different aspects of my work that had remained for me vague and unconscious. What came up again and again was the focus on character, not plot, as the driving force in my novels. Though surely I must have known this is what I was doing, I could not have identified it clearly until my books were out in the world with a life of their own. Then I understood how deeply this vein ran through my work.
For me, story always begins with character, with the shadowy images of imagined people who live in my mind. Wanting to know and understand these people keeps me writing. What happens to my characters is of consequence, but the essence of the undertaking is getting to know them on a deep and sustained level, living with them, listening to them, waiting for them to reveal themselves. This process requires patience and takes place over time, not days or weeks, but months and years, not unlike my own long journey of attempting to know myself through the pages of my journals.
You could say that it was my interest in character—my own and others’—that led me to become an ardent journal writer and later a novelist. Or you could say that the years of keeping a journal that charted my own growth and change led me to become a writer of novels with a strong focus on character. I cannot determine which came first, as the two were always entwined for me, the journal a reflection of my desire to do something more with writing, the novels a natural outgrowth of all that internal searching and reflection. Keeping a journal, however, was an essential piece of my training as a writer. By observing my own life, I learned to observe the lives of others.
I drew on my experience as a journal writer directly in my second novel and placed a fictional journal at the heart of the book. The journal is written by a woman who marries a fisherman and goes to live on a New England island in 1930. Her daughter finds the journal after her death. The narratives of the two women—the daughter in the 1960s and the mother in the found pages of her journal recording her life in the 1930s and 1940s—make up the alternating strands of the novel. In writing this fictional journal, I did not use any material from my own journals. I invented a voice and an unfolding story, trying to be true to a woman of that time who lived a hardscrabble life and endured a difficult marriage and gave birth to four children. I wrote Phoebe Shattuck’s journal entries very much as I would write my own, though, as short, meditative pieces, completing only one or two entries in a morning as I attempted to capture the rhythm of a real journal. Often I felt so close to her that I was in a state akin to hypnosis, taking dictation from a far off voice that was at once disembodied and utterly real. This is the nearest I have come to an experience other writers have described as something like “channeling” a character or taking dictation from God. Phoebe Shattuck’s journal seemed to write itself.
Writing Phoebe Shattuck’s journal was a significant step that allowed me to translate my own long history as a journal writer into a fictional form. I suppose it is no coincidence that this step came about at a time of change in my habits as a journal writer, when I found myself writing far less in the pages of my marble-bound notebooks. Many published writers disdain journal writing as a self-indulgent and wasteful practice. Time spent writing in a journal is time that could be spent on short stories and novels and essays. Who cares about your dreams or the state of your marriage? Put that energy into the real work, they say, where it belongs.
I now have a good deal of sympathy for this point of view, though I would not have given it much credence in earlier years. Maybe it’s partly a question of age. My life is more crowded and complicated now. I truly do not have time to write regularly in my journal, complete the draft of a novel, work as a teacher and freelance writer, and have any kind of a life beyond this. If writing in my journal were important to me, though, I could make the time, but I have to admit that it is not important to me, not in the ways it once was, and with this acknowledgement comes the equally clear insight that it is only because of my years of journal writing, my years of closely observing my own life, that I no longer need to continue the practice as I once did.
In the pages of my journal, I learned to live with contradictions and unresolved conflicts. I became more forgiving of myself, which helped me to become more forgiving of others. I paid attention to nuances in thought and feeling, the small shifts that added up to eventual understanding and change. I practiced compassion for my own confused state of being. Over time the act of journal writing, which began as such a selfabsorbed and self-indulgent habit, made a leap of translation. I was finally able to see others as I saw myself, full of longings and regrets, joys and misgivings. I understood, at last, that I was no different from other people. Their feelings, I knew, were my own feelings. The notebooks that had preserved my sense of separateness for so long came to represent something else entirely—the record of what I shared with others as a human being searching for hope and meaning and guidance, trying to live with my own frustrations and failings.
My journal notebooks are lined up on a shelf in a corner of my office, under the edge of my desk. There are more than fifty notebooks of all shapes and sizes and colors collected over the years. I rarely take them off the shelf. Rereading them can be as painful as it is illuminating. I no longer fantasize about the day when they might be published. Instead, I imagine burning them, making sure they never fall into others’ hands. I am not at all convinced, as I once was, that a significant historical record or brilliant writing lies between the pages of all those notebooks. I am convinced, though, that the writing of those pages taught me more than I will ever realize, that my years as a journal writer were essential to the work I am doing now, and to the work still to come.