Didion approached journaling in a detached, distanced, and meticulous way. She didn’t dramatize her experiences, didn’t add emotions that were not there at the time, didn’t romanticize them, because that would have distorted her own understanding of her true reactions. She didn’t need to “relive” these incidents, but she did need to interpret them after the fact, rather than in the chaos of her immediate reactions. This allowed her to maintain her mental balance in times of crisis. For Didion, the diary is primarily meant to have a cognitive function, it doesn’t exaggerate moments or make them more “memorable,” but writes about what they mean, what sense they have in life, and how they affect her identity. Perhaps because she didn’t treat her journals as literary works and didn’t write them with a view to later publication, she didn’t try to experiment with language, she didn’t create a myth about herself, on the contrary, it helped her to unmask her own illusions (which is very different from the Anaïs Nin).
Joan Didion wrote extensively about journaling in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” from which the quote “remember what it was to be me: that is always the point” comes, defining a diary not as a record of events, but as an opportunity to maintain the continuity of one’s identity. The point of a journal is more about remembering who you were, not what happened, not documenting facts, but subjective experiences. She claimed that journaling wasn’t a spontaneous notation of her own emotions, but rather a practical tool, even when revealing more intimate parts of her world, how she thinks, how she reacts.
chicgirlmoment, what can you gain from the journaling practices of anaïs nin, virginia woolf, and joan didion?
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