SHOW ME YOUR DIARY (holiday edition)
featuring reading recommendations for fellow journal enthusiasts
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…
In place of an interview, today I’m sharing a glimpse of some of the reading around I’ve been doing about diaries. I don’t feel much like celebrating on this long weekend. I thought some of you might be feeling similarly, so here goes.
Along with reading and listening recommendations, I’ve also included two of my recent field trips—one to the New York Public Library to look at Joan Didion’s datebooks and another to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s home in the West Village (well, her front door, but it is still magical!).
I’ll be back to our regularly scheduled weekly interviews next week…
ESSAYS & PODCASTS
“Girls Who Journal Have Always Been Radical” by Elizabeth Austin on Electric Lit
I loved this essay by
that looks at diaries and the women who keep them as resistors. “To keep a diary is to say, I am paying attention to my life, and I believe that it matters,” Austin writes. She pulls examples including Octavia Butler, Chappell Roan, , and Joan Didion to show the different ways women have used their journals across history, as well as the incredible and her Journaling class. Austin also highlights SHOW ME YOUR DIARY (!!) and illuminates a vital aspect about the project, writing:Of course, there’s risk in opening that private space to others. Publishing a journal, or even quoting from one, means forfeiting some of its power. Vulnerability becomes commodity. You’re no longer writing in the dark, you’re curating. McMasters touches on this through her interview series. By asking writers to share their diaries, she is also asking them to decide what gets left in and what gets cut in the curation of their most private thoughts. These are especially sharp questions for women, who’ve long been expected to share their pain (and just as often punished for it.) We valorize the brave confessor until her honesty becomes inconvenient.
Really, you should read the piece in its entirety…and then go write about it in your journal! My favorite part: “The magic isn’t in the polish of these writers’ journaling, but in the persistence. Each writer, in her way, was narrating herself into being.” Amen.
I think I held my breath the entire time I was listening to this incredible podcast on The Thresholds. This episode is about Lisa Ko’s new novel, Memory Place, being based on her own experience of BURNING MORE THAN 20 YEARS OF HER DIARIES.
The burning of diaries is something I’m currently writing about and has come up in many interviews—everything from the violence of women being forced by their partners to burn their diaries, or partners doing the burning, to women doing the burning themselves out of fear or reclamation or revision. In the same way that a writer has the power and right to narrate herself into being, she has the power to destroy her past selves, of course. Kisner is a brilliant and tender interlocutor and builds the story of the diary into a dialogue about art-making:
This interview is sort of about those destroyed diaries, but it’s mostly about finding a sustainable relationship to art-making— trying to figure out one’s relationship to what you leave behind when you go, whether novels can ever change your life or the world around you in the ways you want them to. It’s full of good-humored, thoughtful ideas about art and production, “overnight success,” and letting go of parts of your identity that don’t fit anymore.
Listen to the podcast episode here to learn more about Ko’s decision and new book.
I was fortunate enough to interview journalist and author Becky Aikman about her new book Spitfires: The American Women Who Flew in the Face of Danger During WWII for Newsday. I find this period in women’s history fascinating and have researched many of the “fly-girls” who, in a time when most women did not even have a driver’s license, learned to pilot airplanes. Aikman expertly returns these women to their rightful place in history and does it through—you guessed it—diaries!
If history forgot these women, how did you research them?
I had to track down the families of the women in order to learn about them. For example, I tracked down Winnie Pierce’s son, who was thrilled to talk about his mother. He’d saved his mother’s diaries in his attic because he always wanted her to be recognized for this. He sent me her diaries and they were stunning, so full of emotion and excitement, so candid. I was able to find quite a few diaries and they gave me information about piloting planes as well as their inner lives.
Aikman told me that many of the women left diaries to their children. When she reached out to them, the children were overjoyed and just waiting for someone to tell the story of their mothers and their amazing lives.
Without these diaries, there would be no record of them and their incredible work at all.
DIARIES & PLACES
Joan Didion: New York Public Library
The image from at the top of this newsletter is from a card catalog at the New York Public Library, where I’ve been spending some time tracking a theory about Joan Didion (no, it is not about her therapy or her husband). I’ve had such fun pawing through some of her boxes in the gorgeous Rare Books & Manuscripts room at the library. My first day, I kind of couldn’t believe that I could just….touch her journals and datebooks. Other things I held: her Bible, her Goldwater bumper sticker, her notes for her memorial service. I’m working on a long essay about this so I won’t say much more, but will share this video from the archive, in which I flip to January 30, 1964 and January 32, 1964, her wedding day to John Gregory Dunne and the day after:
On her wedding day, she writes: Oh, No! This is in very big script, especially compared to all her other entries, and the exclamation point is decidedly demonstrative. The following day, her writing regains its composure and she simply writes: I’m smiling again, though that comma feels like there was more to come and she was interrupted.
My favorite part of moving through the diaries was seeing notes on when she was researching, writing, editing, and finally publishing certain of my favorite essays—especially “In Bed” and, unsurprisingly, “On Keeping a Notebook.” These essays have become such totems and touchstones to me that I think I forgot there was a flesh and blood writer attached to them on the other side. Seeing her chicken-scratch scrawl noting them into her accounting log was a beautiful reminder.
Edna St. Vincent Millay: West Village, NYC
I was recently walking around the West Village late one night after dinner when I realized I was on Bedford Street. Twenty-five years ago, one of my boyfriends lived on Bedford and Barrow and I spent a lot of time eating slab bacon and eggs at the Pink Teacup and trying not to break my neck on the cobblestoned streets walking backto his little studio on late nights. One of our favorite pastimes was to sit on the curb across from 75 1/2 Bedford Street and imagine the life of poet and diarist Edna St. Vincent Millay when she lived in this delightedly narrow rowhouse in the early 1920s. The boyfriend and I had both gone to Vassar and so had Edna, so she was a cult figure to us.
Last week, after coming out of a restaurant around the corner, my feet started walking to 75 1/2 on their own and before I knew it I was standing in front of this slip of a brownstone. I don’t think I was ever brave enough to touch the gate when I was in my twenties, but this night I pretended I lived there and just walked right up.
Recently, I was on a panel called “Sylvia Plath: Radical New Directions” at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival with Plath scholars Emily Van Duyne, Ash Trebesacci (read their gorgeous flash essay in Beautiful Things from last week!), and Iris Jamahl Dunkle. Iris and Emily were fresh from a Plath pilgrimage to her Beacon Hill home, as well as the Boston University classroom where she audited a workshop with Anne Sexton. Iris detailed their whole trip, complete with photos, on her substack Finding Lost Voices, so I will let you click through and discover the magic for yourself, but when they went to Plath’s childhood Wellesley home, the owners let them in and allowed them to stand in the crawlspace where Sylvia had once hid after swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills. Iris writes:
When we exited the house, we were all changed in some way as if we’d finally absorbed the cost; the cause of what had happened to a twenty-year-old girl who’d been given electroshock treatments without any sedative or muscle relaxant. Who had essentially been tortured and made to feel that her understanding of the world was wrong. It’s not surprising that she felt she was being punished. She made that choice—to crawl into a grave of her own making to save her family the cost and humiliation of having a daughter who was deemed crazy.
The cost is the point. When we hold a diary in our hands, whether it is our own from years ago or a book of another woman’s published diaries from the library or a journal from an archive, this is what we feel. This is what I felt as I thumbed through Joan Didion’s wedding gift record, and when I put my hand on Edna’s gate, as I stood on the square of sidewalk she must have crossed a thousand times.
I believe it goes back to what Elizabeth Austin wrote in Electric Lit this week: Each writer, in her way, was narrating herself into being. And each time we read these women’s words, or visit their places, we narrate them into being all over again, so they can walk alongside us, even if just for a moment.
Happy reading and writing! I’ll be back with another SHOW ME YOUR DIARY interview next Friday morning. As always, if you enjoyed this post, please share it with a friend!
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.
This is delightful, as always. And thanks for the shout out!
Forever ago I read about Plath and Millay and Sexton…..these monuments to the feminine experience of life, the one that tells us we’re not ok the way we are. I think a lot about what they would say today. Thank you for this outstanding essay.