Don’t Burn the Diary: It Might Help With Your Memoir
Author Laurie Collister implores writers to avoid burning their diaries, because they may help with their memoirs.
One winter night, my neighbor’s French fries caught on fire, burning our condos nearly to the ground. The next day, I ventured home to assess the damage. I poked my head in my second-floor office, afraid of what I’d find. Amazingly, my 300 diaries still lined the floor-to-ceiling shelves. I vowed to read each before another catastrophe did destroy them. And so, I launched a new pastime: Every night after work, I devoured another volume.
As I read the diaries, spanning from 1986, when I’d first moved to LA at the age of 33, to the present, January 2003, I came to an unsettling conclusion: As a diarist, I was not just an archivist, I was also a decoder, and I’d fallen short on the second half of the job description. Each journal entry felt like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Each irregular shape defined a fragment of my life. But the thousands of pieces needed to be fit together. Only then could I see my life trajectory and a much-needed resolution to my arc of change.
Rereading my journals, I also saw the elements of a good story: the small nuances of everyday life; the slow unveiling of hidden parts of myself; overheard dialogue that I recorded word for word. These were details that I’d long since forgotten, such as the moment I met the man I dated when I first moved to LA: My vision blurred by the steam of the gym Jacuzzi and the absence of eyeglasses, I slid into the bubbling water, shoulder-to-shoulder with a man with long black hair and silky skin. He is a hand model from South Dakota named Lance.
Rereading my journals, I saw how each entry served as a mini-therapy session. Writing down my thoughts and feelings, I often discovered something new about myself. For instance, I want a relationship, yes, but maybe what I really want is more relating in my life. Relating can take many forms: relating to myself in the pages of this diary, relating to God in prayer and meditation, relating to readers whom I might entertain or enlighten. Yes, a paramour would be nice, but deepening other forms of relating would be nice, too, and maybe even more fulfilling.
My self-discovery as a diarist presented more than one advantage over traditional therapy: 1. No $250 price tag; 2. 24/7 availability; 3. A full transcript of the therapy session available immediately and 30 years later; and 4. Developing the agency to fix my own problems.
Rereading my diaries, I saw how healing my diaries were, especially in trying times. (And there were many trying times in LA, like citywide riots, earthquakes and fires.) I could sit at a café, my diary splayed open on my lap, simmering with anxiety and confusion, but after journaling for six pages, all that toxicity—well, at least most of it—melted away. No psychotropics downed, no weed smoked, no cash shelled out for therapy, yet I’d leave the coffeeshop calmer and cleaner inside.
Rereading my diaries led me to recommit to my journaling practice. After much experimentation, I identified the perfect journal, manufactured by Leuchtturm1917, a family-run German stationery firm founded in 1917. The porosity of the paper made my pen glide over the page. The numbered pages made it easy to note passages, like quotes and character studies, that I wanted to include in short stories. And the hardcover volumes, available in a rainbow of colors, could decorate my shelves for decades to come.
I posted one six-page diary entry a day, and more if I had time. And I began the daily practice of recording five compelling details—such as a dilemma or an unusual setting. That routine forced me to view my life with more of a writer’s eye, not letting anything elude my powers of observation.
Ultimately, I figured out my diaries brought out the best parts of me: as an archivist documenting in granular detail every aspect of my day; as a decoder, making sense of every challenge and plot twist; and as a student, learning lessons, often overdue.
My diaries allowed me to view myself as the protagonist in my own story. Eventually, I saw that protagonist’s life trajectory and the resolution of her arc of change. I fit all the pieces of the puzzle together and, for the first time, painted complete pictures—pictures which slowly evolved into two memoirs.
Check out Laurie Collister's A Different Kind of Vow here:
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