SHOW ME YOUR DIARY
featuring writer Elizabeth Austin
Hello there! Welcome to The Magpie, a newsletter that serves as a collection of shiny objects about writing, creativity, hopes, and obsessions. My current obsession is diaries and the people who write them. Since I started keeping one at age eight, my diary has been a place of exploration and intensity, of lists and favorite quotes, of ticket stubs and wildflowers. It is a place to remember and a place to dream.
My most recent book, The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays, is out now! I relied on decades of my own diaries to help me write this book. My next book focuses on historical diaries of women, famous and not, and why we continue to write—and read!—these archives.
This is a Show Me Your Diary interview, a series that explores diaries and the creatives who keep them. Every week, I ask a new person to give us a peek inside their diary process, complete with photos. Yes, we are very nosy!
Want to show me your diary, or know somebody who does? Send me an email—you can just reply to this newsletter. Let’s get started…
Today’s interview is with Elizabeth Austin, one of the first friends I’ve made through journaling. If our mutual love of journaling placed us on each other’s radar, it was Elizabeth’s powerful voice in her essays that made me dig in, from the candidness of her
essay I Was the World’s Worst Cancer Mom to her take on Gisèle Pelicot’s collective courage in Harper’s Bazaar. In each of her pieces, there is a kind of vicious generosity, a mix of beauty and no time for bullshit. She’s been to the edge and gives no fucks and yet still loves deeply.Lately, I’ve been sharing a link to Elizabeth’s Substack’s very excellent Writer’s Starter Pack, a must-read for any writer—those who are just starting out and even those who have been around the publishing block. Based on her essays and newsletter, I had a feeling Elizabeth would have interesting answers to my SHOW ME YOUR DIARY interview, though I wasn’t quite prepared for the extreme creativity across her pages (I’m making myself laugh aloud in the corner bagel shop as I write this, thinking about a new Olympic sport called EXTREME JOURNALING—Elizabeth would get a gold medal).
Getting a glimpse of Elizabeth’s journals feels like such an insight into her creative process—not just her writing, but her life. Every page feels so alive. I’ll pull a quote from one of her favorite diarists, Octavia Butler: “Every story I write, creates me. I write to create myself.” Each of Elizabeth’s pages pulses with the feeling of a personal creation myth. If a diary is a repository for our greatest hopes and dreams, it can also be a spellbook to help us move closer to the life we want, as Elizabeth notes below.
For this interview, we talked about the difference between writing for the moment vs. writing for preservation, the way her journaling practice changed while her child was going through cancer, and why she will never, ever read her daughter’s diary.
And, of course, she lets us peek inside some of her actual diaries, starting with this glorious, enviable stack…
THE MAGPIE: Team Diary vs Team Journal? What do you like to call it?
ELIZABETH AUSTIN: I call it a journal now, because it’s a catch-all for the ephemera of my life, but growing up I thought of it more as a diary because it was a safe place for my private thoughts. It feels wrong to claim to keep a diary when, at the moment, it’s mostly scribbled grocery and packing lists, half-considered meal plans, essay ideas, and notes from classes and workshops.
I’ve kept diaries since before I could write. I remember being very young and scribbling across lined pages in little notebooks my mom had lying around, imitating script before I was able to spell. Then as a kid and into my preteen years I was known for keeping a diary, so family members would gift me different blank notebooks as gifts which I then filled with notes, drawings, and records of my daily life. Since my earliest years, the two physical items I always remember having within reach are my teddy bear and a journal.
I love that I still have them all, and I’ll save them as long as I’m alive, but the essential part of them for me is the writing of them, not their preservation.
What do you hope will happen to your journals once you are gone?
I hope my kids read them with some fondness. They’re a window into who I was at the time that I wrote them, and many of them are from before my kids existed, so maybe they’ll satisfy any curiosity my kids might have about who their mother was. Beyond that, I don’t much care– my journals are and always have been for me, so once I’m gone they really have no purpose or meaning anymore.
I love that I still have them all, and I’ll save them as long as I’m alive, but the essential part of them for me is the writing of them, not their preservation.
What is your favorite kind of journal?
I’ve gone through phases, and I think they’re largely lifestyle-dependent. When I was an adolescent and teen, I loved blank or lined pages where I could write all my thoughts and feelings down and draw and paste in ticket stubs and photos and whatever. I had a lot of leather-covered journals with cool textured paper, probably from the notebook wall at Barnes and Noble.
Then I had kids in my early 20’s, and my journals turned to more…organizing my life. Going through them, I noticed there are more grocery lists, more hand-drawn calendars, more reminders. I used a ton of Moleskines, and went through a specific grid-dot phase when my kids first started full-day school and I had time for color-coded bullet journaling. When my daughter was sick, it changed again– I started using my notes app on my phone because it was often all I had with me during her hospital stays. Then a friend gifted me a refillable leather journal, which I’ve used ever since.
Right now I have three books going: one is a line-a-day book that spans five years. I’ve kept up with it every day this year and I really want to see it to completion. I also have a New Yorker desk diary, which I’ve used every year for the past three years and really love. It’s my schedule, my to-do list, and my meal plan. It pretty much holds my whole life together. Then, of course, I have the leather journal. I’m on my fourth insert, and I love it. I think it might be the one.
I really want to make sure my kids are allowed their privacy, that there are spaces they feel truly safe in, and a diary to me is the ultimate safe space.
Has anyone ever read your diaries? Or have you ever read anyone else’s?
When my daughter started keeping a diary a few years ago (she’s 13 now), I promised her I’d never read it and I’ve kept that promise. She was starting to go through some elaborate motions trying to hide her diary and I was like, “Listen, I don’t care if sitting out on the dining room table, I’ll never read a single page.” Growing up, I don’t remember having that same feeling of security. I really want to make sure my kids are allowed their privacy, that there are spaces they feel truly safe in, and a diary to me is the ultimate safe space.
The only diaries I’ve read are either published or purchased. I have a habit of buying old diaries at flea markets, and it always strikes me how everyday the entries are because they’re also so interesting. I have an incomplete five year diary that a woman Elaine was keeping in 1947 and 1948. On Wednesday October 13 she wrote, “Worked not too hard today. Down town playing pinball machine for short time and then home and in bed very early, oh well what else is there to do.” Girl, same!
Do you ever tuck ephemera into your journals?
Yes, tons. I actually have to be careful when I revisit my old journals because things will spill out of them if I hold them the wrong way. There are pressed flowers, old photos, movie tickets, boarding passes, scribbled-on napkins, and half-completed crosswords I used to cut out of the papers customers left behind when I worked in a restaurant in New York.
On one of my journal’s pages I taped a ticket for the Galleria in Florence from the first time I went to Italy in 2005, which is so fun to see because I remember falling in love with Florence at that time and wondering, longingly, if I’d ever go back. I wish I could tell myself that 20 years later, I’m visiting Florence for the third time– and I’m bringing along the kids I spent all of my teen years swearing I’d never have!
Is there a diarist you aspire to or a diarist who has inspired you?
Octavia Butler, for her declarations on the writing life and her belief in herself. Every time I slip into the feeling of “maybe this isn’t working out, maybe I should quit” I pull up photos of her notebooks with all her manifestations: “This is my life. I write bestselling novels. My novels go onto the bestseller lists on or shortly after publication…I will find the way to do this. So be it! See to it!” Yes, ma’am!
Annie Ernaux, because the way she writes in her diaries is the way I wish I wrote all the time. What she chooses to document and the way she records her experiences is so striking. I could read Getting Lost for hours at a time. Also, it feels so honest….she’s pining over this guy (who among us?), and you read it and you just want to say, omg, forget him, you’re Annie Ernaux! There’s an endearing honesty in sharing all of it, not as reflection written after the fact, but as raw documentation as it happened. There’s a lot that’s ordinary and relatable about it all. Annie Ernaux, she’s just like us!
How does your writer voice differ from your journal voice?
I tend to let my anxieties fly in my journal, and then on the page I’m a bit more considered and maybe more restrained. I’m aware when I’m repeating myself in my outward-facing writing, when I’ve maligned the same worry fifty different times, but in my journal it doesn’t matter– there are no rules! I can harp on the same issue over and over. I can be a little whiny, have a little victim-complex, be the person I won’t necessarily show to the outside world. It’s the raw material before it’s refined. My journaling is not designed for public consumption. It’s all draft, and it feels special to keep that part of my writing process just for myself.
More About Elizabeth Austin:
Elizabeth Austin's writing has appeared in Time, Harper's Bazaar, McSweeney's, Narratively and others. A Sewanee and Hedgebrook fellow, she is currently working on a memoir about being a bad cancer mom. She lives outside of Philly with her two children and their many pets. Find her at writingelizabeth.com and on Instagram @writingelizabeth.
Elizabeth runs an interview series, Instrument, Surface Setting, Story, where she invites creatives to answer four questions about their tools and processes.
She is thrilled to be teaching a seminar with Writing Workshops in July exploring our relationship to pain, both physical and emotional.
And be sure to check out Elizabeth’s Substack about the messy reality of being a working writer and a single mom (and you’ll find that excellent Writer’s Start Pack here!):
Thanks for reading The Magpie by Kelly McMasters! As always, more of what I’m up to can be found on my website, and you can follow me on Instagram for day-to-day updates.
Buy The Leaving Season here, Welcome to Shirley here, Wanting: Women Writing About Desire here, and This is the Place: Women Writing About Home here.
 | A guest post by
|
The photo of all the journals stacked up drew me in. I have kept a journal since third grade. No regrets … even when reading about my nine-year-old regrets.
I gotta say I love these glimpses into journal keeping. One of my new favourite things to read. I also have a 5- year one line diary and had forgotten about it and will resurrect it! Thanks for sharing.