Literature entails a private act that goes public — a novel or book of poems becomes a publication. So it’s an ideal place to locate certain anxieties about the self and its relation to the wider world. And what form of literature exacerbates these anxieties more than the diary?
Yesterday, Zadie Smith, who is no stranger to expressing her anxieties to the public, wrote a short piece for Rookie called “Life Writing.” In the piece, Smith explains her many failed attempts to take up diaristic writing. Her first attempt, she writes, “devolved into a banal account of fake crushes and imagined romance and I was soon disgusted with it and put it aside.” Later efforts also proved fruitless. Smith writes that she could never oust an imagined reader or audience from her mind:
I was never able to block from my mind a possible audience, and this ruined it for me: It felt like homework. I was always trying to frame things to my advantage in case so-and-so at school picked it up and showed it to everybody. The dishonesty of diary writing—this voice you put on for supposedly no one but yourself—I found that idea so depressing. I feel that life has too much artifice in it anyway without making a pretty pattern of your own most intimate thoughts.More
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