The past fifty years have seen a collapse in the quality of women’s diary writing, argues Nicola Shulman in her review of Secret Voices: A year of women’s diaries, edited by Sarah Gristwood. She finds the clue for their strange death in Gristwood’s preface: “the strongest emotions voiced through all these diary entries ... would be anger – frustration”. In more patriarchal times women protested male injustice in the privacy of their journals. Today women vent their anger freely via smartphones and social media. Thrown out of doors by her brute of a husband and deprived of contact with her daughter, Ellen Weeton, for instance, complains: “When man injures woman how can she defend herself ? ... she cannot have a jury of her peers or equals, for men, everywhere prejudiced against the sex, are her jurors; man her judge”. Teenage girls make the best diarists, concludes Shulman, as they “bound one by one through the gate of their compound”, only to find in adulthood that they are confined “in another, smaller compound – one with no door”.
Sheila Heti’s curiously arranged Alphabetical Diaries reads like an exercise in self-help. Under the entry B, Heti urges: “Be bald-faced and strange. Be calm. Be cautious with your money”. Under S: “Stop googling yourself. Stop reading the reviews”. This advice is “usually good”, says Megan Marz. “Or you could interpret its frequent repetition as winking evidence of self-improvement’s uselessness.”
“Manuscripts don’t burn”, says the Devil in Mikh
