Girl Tech - Majuscule

On Writing and Reading Diaries

I knew that keeping a diary was part of being a girl because as a child I was constantly given blank notebooks as gifts. What I really desired (but never got) was a Girl Tech Password Journal, a diary that came inside a locking plastic case, some versions of which included built-in lamps and little compartments for keepsakes. In the commercials, tween girls called out passwords—“DANCER!,” “GIRLS ROCK!”—in order to unlock the protective case that held the diary. They wrote “ROBBY IS SO CUTE” in invisible ink. They had snooping little brothers. In one version, the brother overhears his sister announcing her password, the implications of which would seem to reflect poorly on the diary’s design (I’m not totally sure about the security of a password you have to shout out to use), but I guess that wasn’t the point. The point was that girls have secrets—about boys, probably—that are to be written in diaries and kept from boys, who will inevitably want to know them.

For a long time, I followed this injunction in my own diaries, which I have always kept without much discipline but with enough regularity that most years of my life from age 10 onward are represented among the pile of notebooks I now keep in a drawer alongside high-school yearbooks and ancient birthday cards. The oldest diary I still have is a spiral notebook with a black-and-white stock image of three girls in swimsuits embracing on its cover. Inside is a note from my mother stating that the journal was a Christmas gift from my aunt, and on the first page I’ve written my full name, doodled some hearts, and made the warning:

“UNLESS U HAVE A GOOD REASON PLEASE DO NOT READ.” The next page follows up on this:

“Dear Nosy, You must be pretty stupid. I said to STOP reading. So, since you didn’t get it the first time, STOP reading. You are really stupid. I said STOP! Sincerely, Christina McCausland.”

And then I’ve scrawled PRIVATE across the page in gel pen. On the following pages, I find lists of crushes; assessments of boys who might have crushes on me; worry about my weight and dieting; “steps to a perfect day”; illustrations of “peaple I hate or am mad at”; cursive-handwriting practice; accounts of fights with my parents or siblings. At the end of the notebook, I’ve written another message to a potential reader who ignored my notes at the beginning:

“This notebook is filled with lists and personal entries, stories, etc., by Christina Milena McCausland. I got this Christmas of 4th grade. This is me during, well, puberty, and the preteen stage. Excuse me if I said something mean about you, in most cases I didn’t mean it!

Love,

Cristi McCausland”

In the context of the warnings on the opening few pages, this gives me pause. I insist, at first, that no one should read. But by the end, I am addressing and apologizing to the reader I claimed not to want. Even at age 10, it seems, I knew that a diary’s privacy was dependent on its theoretical ability to be read, a contradiction I had to actually face down several years ago when my boyfriend told me that he’d been reading my diary.

The history of first-person writing is rooted in the same kind of coy revelation I was toying with in my childhood diaries, though often this revelation was more salacious than my own “steps to a perfect day.” In about 395 A.D., for example, Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote that he had either masturbated or had sex in church during Mass—“I defied you even so far as to relish the thought of lust, and gratify it too, within the walls of your church during the celebration of your mysteries.” He wasn’t bragging: The book in which this line appears, Confessions, is a thorough admission of his youthful sins, written in his 40s, by which time he had overcome his youthful naughtiness, found Christianity, and become a bishop. The “you” in the text is God, but Augustine was simultaneously writing for a public audience, for whom his path out of perdition could be an example and his ruminations on the nature of God and the role of religion could be guidance. The sins he describes in the first half of the book (before he converts) are typically related to lust and “fornication,” but he also includes a memorable account of stealing pears with his friends as a teenager (“The evil in me was foul, but I loved it … If any part of one of those pears passed my lips, it was the sin that gave it flavor”). This book is considered the first memoir ever written, and it demonstrates how the emergence of Christianity, with its focus on the individual soul, opened up new possibilities for considering the self in writing.

It wasn’t until the Renaissance, however, that memoir as we in the West understand it now would come to exist as a defined genre—the first autobiography in English is usually said to be the Norfolk Christian mystic Margery Kempe’s The Book of Margery Kempe. Kempe’s book, written at the turn of the 15th century, details the psychosis and religious ecstasy she experienced after the birth of her first child (when she says she was visited by multiple devils as well as by Jesus Christ), her subsequent attempt to live a chaste and devout life (giving up meat and sex, even with her husband), her trials for heresy, and her pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, Germany, and Spain. Kempe was apparently illiterate, and so she dictated her book to a scribe, who is thought to have been her priest and confessor. She wrote her book in the third-person: Kempe refers to herself as “this creature” throughout, usually understood as a technique to demonstrate humility.

Many later examples of life writing—the broad category that includes both memoir and diaries, as well as letters, travelogs, and household records—were shaped by this Christian-writing tradition, where writing is a form of religious self-examination. Some, like Augustine and Kempe’s, were intended for publication. Others, those closer to what we think of as diaries today, were written for an assumed audience of God or maybe just the writer themselves: for example, in the fourth century, Saint Anthony wrote down his sins to prepare for confession, and in the 1800s, a similar form was used by schoolboys as a form of moral instruction.

I rarely return to my old diaries. But I knew I would have to revisit them in order to write this essay, and I put off the task for weeks. When I eventually started in on them, I found I couldn’t stop: I read, as Virginia Woolf wrote of reading her diaries, “with a kind of guilty intensity… as one always does read one’s own writing.”

I both did and did not recognize the girl writing. Sometimes I could tell that I was parroting something I thought I should be saying, or that I had heard others say. Many entries are frustrating in that they provide just enough detail to jog my memory about events I’ve forgotten, but not enough to satisfyingly fill in the narrative blanks. Reading now, I wanted a factual record that includes what I was wearing, who said what, what exactly happened when, say, I got back together with my high-school boyfriend after breaking up two years prior. “Too much to explain” I wrote at the time—I had so much faith in the importance of the event that I assumed I’d be able to remember it forever. But when I read references in my oldest diaries, from 10 to about 13, to my “bad habit,” something I never, in any of the diaries, actually name or explain further, just repeatedly promise to quit doing, I do know exactly what I’m talking about—masturbation, which I discovered around that age, as many children do, and which I quickly learned was a sin that would send me to Hell.

My early Catholic education took place in a church attached to a parochial school, where I was in the third-ever class. A Scottish priest named Father Whyte ran the institution and conducted all of our sacraments. My cohort and I began confessing in second grade, after memorizing the Act of Contrition—Oh my God, I am sorry for my sins with all of my heart—and from then on we would go to the chapel regularly as a class, to confess one by one. There was no confessional, that little closet with a chair and a priest behind a screen. Instead, when my turn came, I entered a small room that was doubling as the sacristy and sat on a metal folding chair, at an angle to Father Whyte, who was on his own folding chair. This way we could see each other without quite being face to face. This ritual was, for a time, sort of fun—I enjoyed the attention and the ceremony, the opportunity to talk about myself to this man I feared and respected. But it became much more fraught once I learned about masturbation in my religion class.

I began following my nightly orgasm with a euphemistic prayer: Please God, forgive me for everything I’ve done wrong and everything I’m going to do wrong tomorrow. But that wasn’t technically enough, I knew. I had to announce the sin in confession in order to be given a penance to perform so that God would forgive me. How could I tell Father Whyte, who knew my family, classmates, teachers, about this thing I did and continued to do even though I’d learned that it was wrong? I couldn’t even say it in my diary, or to God privately! There was only one way to approach this situation: stare straight ahead and give the Father a fictional report of my sins, excluding any that would make either of us uncomfortable and including some that seemed innocuous but plausible—I told him that I’d fought with my siblings, lied to my parents, and been mean to classmates. Of course, in constructing these confessions, I was adding another habitual sin to my list, that of lying. But in retrospect, I might say instead that, in being selectively truthful in both my diary and these confessions, I was learning how to be a writer.

In the 1780s, the French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau published in two parts a book called Confessions, explicitly taking on the tradition from Augustine. Like Augustine’s, Rousseau’s text contains many accounts of shameful acts: his (failed) attempt to steal apples from his employer, the time he framed a young servant girl for his own theft of a ribbon and likely made her lose her job, and his “expedient” dumping of all five of the children born to him by his sort-of wife, Thérèse Levasseur (their marriage wasn’t legal), at a foundling hospital. However, although Rousseau was inspired by the form of Catholic confession, his goal was not absolution but rather to explain himself. When describing his apparently bad behavior, he doesn’t ask for forgiveness but rather for fair understanding: “I have promised my confession and not my justification … It is my duty faithfully to relate the truth, that of the reader to be just; more than this I never shall require of him.”

In between Augustine and Rousseau’s Confessions, personal writing had started to solidify as a genre—especially by the 17^th century in Europe and North America. The reason for this proliferation of writing about the self had to do with increased literacy, of course. But there were also big social shifts: the burgeoning idea of the individual as autonomous, and, importantly, the rationalization of the measurement of time—clocks and calendars becoming things that people used in their homes and used to keep track of their lives. Together these changes led to people having an idea of themselves as individuals whose evolution through time could be documented, as in a memoir or a diary.

Rousseau’s autobiography was one of the first examples of this secular kind of life writing. His opening lines demonstrate that he knew this: “I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself.” Indeed, writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, and Thomas de Quincy are said to have been inspired by Rousseau’s work in writing their own autobiographies.

As Rousseau broke the path for autobiographies, Marie Bashkirtseff, a Russian painter living in France, set a trend for a new way of approaching diary-keeping. In 1884, she died of tuberculosis at 26 years old; three years later, her diary was published and instantly became a sensation. Bashkirtseff had suffered from ill health for much of her life and was convinced she would die young. She explicitly wanted immortality: “I want to remain on this earth by whatever means. If I do not die young, I hope to remain as a great artist, but if I die young, I want my journal to be published,” she wrote in the preface she composed for her diary in her last year of life.

Bashkirtseff was born in what is now Ukraine. When she was 12 years old, her parents separated, and she traveled through Europe with her mother, eventually settling in Paris, where she occupied the awkward class position of being wealthy but having a family that was considered gauche (her parents’ separation was only one part of this—some members her family had been involved in some shameful schemes in order to get their hands on more wealth). Her diary details her coming of age in the gilded era in France and Italy. She writes of her artistic ambitions, suitors, crushes, gossip, her embarrassment about her family, and her own frustrations that the people around her did not understand her.

When the diary was first published, heavily edited and censored by her mother, it caused a scandal—nothing like it had been seen in France before. Literary journals published reviews condemning it as a disagreeable imposition of a troubled soul on the public, and others that admired it as an unparalleled and in-depth “self-record” that provided insights into “human nature.” Its English translation, which appeared in England and the U.S. in 1889, turned out to be extremely influential: In her 1990 study, Diaries and Journals of Literary Women, the life-writing scholar Judy Simons notes that the publication of Bashkirtseff’s diary “started something of a vogue for intimate confessional reminiscences among well-bred young women with imaginative aspirations.”

Like secular life-writing in general, secular diaries—dated, ostensibly private details of daily life, perhaps along with impressions and feelings—had first gained popularity among bourgeois women in 18th-century England, particularly as people began reading more and thus had models for narrativizing a life. At this time, public writing, such as polemic or poetry, wasn’t necessarily seen as an appropriate forum for women; those were male forms. But because of the diary’s roots in the safely feminized practices of household record-keeping and letter-writing, and its relationship to spirituality, it had a sheen of acceptability, making it one of the few genres women could experiment in. Despite this, it remained unavoidably a bit seditious: self-aggrandizing and secretive at a time when women were expected to be silent and modest.

Simons therefore posits that “privacy was a precondition of women’s literary development.”Diary writing, which she frames as a major element of women’s literary history, could not have existed without the notion that such writing was not intended for an audience. It’s easy to gloss over the amazing paradox that this history of diary-keeping presents. The idea of a wholly private genre is at odds with the idea of authorship itself. What does it mean to write for no one?

One day this past spring, I was feeling old—approaching my mid-30s, about to get married, realizing I needed to decide the motherhood question very soon—and nostalgic for my youth. I wanted to reconnect with past me; I thought I might do this through someone who had known her. So I texted a man I had dated for most of high school. We had to reschedule twice but we finally managed to have dinner, the first time we’d hung out in 10 years. It was fine, cordial, friendly even. Catching up with him was nice. But the intimacy I’d been seeking, not with him exactly, but through him, with who I’d been, wasn’t there. I’d had the sense, maybe, that my life and history existed not only in my memory but also in those of the people I have known and been connected to. I found, instead, that I am the sole keeper of those things, that the responsibility for marking (or not) my path through time is mine alone, and that even when my past is reflected back at me through other people, it will still strike me as incorrect or incomplete.

If I had been asked before the diary-reading incident, I think I would have said that this was the purpose of diary-keeping, to stay connected with my past, that a diary is among the kinds of writing that are a kind of private time travel (grocery lists, to-do lists, nice words jotted down, the hand-drawn maps I find in the pockets of coats that I’ve had since before smartphones). But ever since I found out that my diary had been read, I’ve wondered if this conception of a diary’s work is also too simple; if perhaps an outside reader is necessary to make contact with the past.

A version of the diary as we know it today, as a private text of self-examination, came on the heels of the cultural shifts that accompanied the turn to the 20th century in the West—the discovery of the secular self via romanticism; the industrial revolution’s emphasis on the gendered divide between the private and the public sphere; and psychoanalysis’s articulation of the individual consciousness. Diaries thus became texts whose primary subject was the self, examined through the lenses of self-reflection and emotion, which were associated with the private sphere and thus with femininity, continuing the diary’s relegation as a female form.

Given the baseline conditions necessary to keep a diary—literacy and a certain amount of leisure time—most of these 20th-century diarists were well-off, just as most diarists in previous centuries had been, and the keeping of a diary was considered a mark of refinement, a lady’s activity. Etiquette books from the era instructed girls in the form, which solidified the standards of the practice, including the salutation “Dear Diary.” Some diarists instead addressed their entries to famous novelists or gave the diaries a name and wrote to them as if to a friend.

For the Western world, Bashkirtseff’s work was a model of this new kind of diary. It also opened up a new motivation for diarists: fame. Among those writers who explicitly referenced Bashkirtseff as an inspiration were many whose own diaries would go on to find audiences as published works: Anaïs Nin, Mary MacLane, and Katherine Mansfield. But Bashkirtseff’s diaries also inspired countless other young women (as well as some young men) to keep their own records, or to reframe the way they were thinking of the diary-keeping practice they already had. Suddenly a diary began to be seen as an artistic pursuit. Oscar Wilde satirized this state of affairs in 1895’s The Importance of Being Earnest, when Gwendolyn tells Cecily that she never travels without her diary, as “one should always have something sensational to read on the train.” Cecily, in turn, later responds to Algernon’s request to read her diary, “Oh no. You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.”

I called my boyfriend on my walk home. It was late on a weeknight so when he picked up the phone he was half-asleep, but already annoyed at me, as he often was that summer. What. He knew I’d been out with a new friend, and I hadn’t bothered to hide my crush on them from him. We made out. I was excited, and I didn’t know who else to tell. I thought, somehow, that he would be happy for me, or supportive because, at 29, it was the first time I’d both acknowledged and acted on my queer desire. What do you want me to say to that?

I asked him if I could have them over the next day. I just need to fuck them and then this can be over. After some prodding, he gave me his permission. They came over the next afternoon while he was at work; we had sex; a few days later, they left the country to go back home. I had promised my boyfriend that that would be it, that we were just friends now.

But it wasn’t over. I spent the next couple of months in a fog of infatuation that I continually denied. My boyfriend began to remark on how often I was smiling while on my phone. He woke up in the middle of the night to find me also awake, texting this person. Saw the time-zone math on a scrap of paper. Told me that I was talking to myself. That I seemed barely present. Still, I insisted, everything was fine.

I have never been a completist in my diary-keeping. I write in my diary when I am feeling bad or confused; I almost never write when I am happy. What is there to transform? I want life exactly as it is. But when something in life isn’t working, when I need to pretend I have had the last word, when a circumstance needs to be reshaped or reimagined, that is when I turn to my diary. That summer I wrote regularly—I wasn’t used to the idea of myself as someone unreliable, untrustworthy, or destructive. I felt guilty and confused. So I was trying on ideas, constructing a new character: a woman who had an affair and might leave her fatally permissive (supportive) boyfriend in order to explore her late-in-life bisexuality.

Some diary excerpts from that period: “I find myself so attracted to them, just thinking about them nonstop, my heart aching and my clit throbbing … I’m exhausted from trying to decide how/if these feelings can fit into my relationship with [boyfriend] (seems like they can’t) … I am having so much fun nursing my romantic feelings for [lover] … I liked the way they fucked me … an emotional part of me feels like I want to be with them, even though I barely know them … What would it be like to have more time with them? … I wish I had touched them more … Should I move to the other side of the world to see if I can be with them? … Is it too late to start over?”

In the 2010s, very personal writing by women seemed to be the engine that the entire internet ran on. Laura Bennett, one of the first to identify this trend, opened her 2015 article for Slate about the first-person essay and the internet, “The First-Person Industrial Complex,” with a summary of an incestuous oral-sex scene from a personal essay called “On Falling In and Out of Love With My Dad” that had been published in Jezebel a few months prior. The very first things that Bennett notes about that essay’s writer, Natasha Chenier, other than her current age (27), were that she “had always kept a diligent journal and had been reading Jezebel for years.”

In her piece, Bennett identified the first-person essay as the internet’s dominant form, observing that it had become “the easiest way for editors to stake out some small corner of a news story and assert an on-the-ground primacy without paying for reporting.” The essays in question tended to be “harrowing”—accounts of the worst or most abject things that have ever happened to the writer, epitomized, for Bennett, by Chenier’s account of the sexual relationship that developed between her and her father after they met for the first time when she was 19. Chenier’s editor at Jezebel had been Jia Tolentino (Bennett interviewed them both in her article), who two years later also wrote about the so-called first-person industrial complex. In Tolentino’s piece, she declared that, in 2017, the era of the online personal essay was finished: “There’s a specific sort of ultra-confessional essay,” she wrote, “written by a person you’ve never heard of and published online, that flourished until recently and now hardly registers.”

Both Bennett and Tolentino note that these kinds of essays were especially common on sites that target women, which tend to have smaller budgets and lower barriers to entry for freelance writers than general-interest or literary publications do. But Tolentino takes the weight of this observation a step further when she writes that “the commodification of personal experience was … women’s territory.” The internet’s market for first-person writing was an exploitative one for women, she argues, who are turning their trauma into content for very little money and no clear career gain.

To me, it’s obvious that the boom of this kind of essay, as cynical as the particular phenomenon both writers describe actually was, is part of the same history that made diaries like Bashkirtseff’s sensations: There has always been a strong market for “the record of a woman’s life … without any attempt at concealment,” as Bashkirtseff put it.

After Bennett’s essay was published, some commentators observed that the dynamic being described did not work the same way for writers of color. LaToya Peterson, who was then an editor at large at Fusion, said, “This overshare, gross-out phenomenon of ‘first-person writing’ is generally a door that leads to more fame and work for white women … Society sees women of color’s shameless writing as proof of deviance, not a relatable and fun story to share on social media.” I think the key word here is “relatable”—personal writing by women of color is more often seen by a mainstream (white) audience as writing from and representative of a specific niche. In his book The Art of Confession, Christopher Grobe describes a hierarchy of relatability: white men can write personally in a way that is applicable to everyone; white women’s writing is, in contrast, read as merely personal; and writers of color, both men and women in Grobe’s conception, are understood as merely public. In other words, a writer of color is burdened with seeming to write on behalf of their identity.

The implications of this hierarchy extend beyond the personal essay. In 2020, Tope Folarin asked, in The New Republic, “Can a Black novelist write autofiction?” He points out that the writers most commonly associated with autofiction as a movement are all white: Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, etc. But this isn’t because writers of color don’t use the strategies and tropes of autofiction, it’s because, Folarin argues, when writers of color use details from real life in their fiction as is characteristic of autofiction, the works are more often simply described as being, well, autobiographical. Some people are allowed to use autobiography artfully. Others are assumed to be merely writing what they know. So, for example, Folarin’s novel, which he says was specifically influenced by autofiction, was regularly described by critics as an “immigrant novel.” He argues that this is because mainstream critics, who are by and large responsible for maintaining the idea of autofiction as a movement (since it’s not really an organized school of work—the writers associated with it aren’t working together to define a new way of writing), understand only lives they can relate to as the kind of prosaic, banal stuff that makes up autofiction; fiction that uses autobiographical details that come from outside the average critic’s experience is something else. “The status quo also signals that certain lives are worthy of being transformed into literature regardless of how prosaic and boring they may be,” Folarin writes, “while others are not.”

Interestingly, Bennett and Tolentino both use the word “confessional” throughout their articles to delineate the kinds of personal essays they’re discussing. In her 1983 book How to Suppress Women’s Writing, Joanna Russ paints the use of the term “confessional” to describe women’s writing as a strategy for dismissing the work. It is a way to “promulgate the idea that women make themselves ridiculous by creating art.” The label frames what has been written as both “not art” and as “shameful and too personal.” Notably, the literal confessions of Rousseau and Augustine are not dismissed as confessional; they are instead considered foundational to literature as we know it.

Today, many writers whose work has been deemed confessional object to that designation. During a 2017 panel organized by LitHub, Melissa Febos called the idea that personal narrative is confessional “the most tired line of sexist horseshit”; Lidia Yuknavitch said that the designations “robbed us of our own agency as people who make art”; Sarah Gerard argued that “you don’t confess to something that isn’t a crime.”

That Bennett, in her article, immediately invokes Chenier’s journal-keeping, with no further elaboration, as explanation for why she decided to write about her experience, hints at an implied connection here between this kind of personal writing and diary-keeping—that this kind of essay is not very far away from a journal entry, which is where, perhaps, “confession” is most appropriate. Diaries, as Russ points out, have long been denigrated as “not counting” as an art form, just as the personal essays of the 2010s have been. Ernest Renan said diaries are “unwholesome, a genre that is usually chosen by people who can’t write anything else; Maurice Blanchot has called them worthless; George Duhamel says they are “perversions… orgies of secret literature.”

That fall my boyfriend and I rented a car and drove to a one-room cabin in the mountains. I feel like I’m back in it, I told him. Back in what?

I’d (reluctantly, at first) broken off contact with my friend-turned-lover a few weeks earlier. I was trying to remember what it meant to be in a relationship with my boyfriend, how to be perfectly happy the way I’d been merely six months before. We hiked, ate pancakes, fucked, laughed as we opened up all the windows on a frigid night to air out the cabin after trying to light a fire and instead almost poisoning ourselves with smoke. I was starting to feel convinced of the story in which I stayed. We propped my iPhone on the porch railing and used the self-timer to take portraits of ourselves in front of the cabin. Back in us.

A month later, I was at work when he texted me: Can we talk when you get home? I anticipated another conversation about my summer affair, which still came up regularly. I spent the rest of the day trying to think about ways to earnestly apologize, what kind of repentance would get him closer to trusting me again. Instead, when we sat on our cat-scratched Ikea couch that evening, he told me that he’d been reading my diary for weeks.

As the affair had faded, I hadn’t been writing in my diary as frequently. I was getting back into my old life; there was nothing to reshape. But I haven’t written in it in months?

I’ve just been rereading all of the entries from back then over and over again.

His confession was unsettling. It hurt to imagine him stuck in a loop of the events of four months before, wallowing in the pain of it while I felt like we were healing. I also both welcomed and felt guilty about enjoying the shift in the scales, glad to suddenly not be the only one of us who had done something bad. But what disturbed me the most was the fact that I was not very upset about the supposed violation.

In a 1957 entry from her published diaries, Susan Sontag reveals that she’s read her lover Harriet’s journal and found an entry about herself—a “curt, unfair, uncharitable assessment of me which concludes by her saying that she really doesn’t like me but my passion for her is acceptable and opportune.” In a transparent effort to nurse her wounded ego, Sontag argues first that diaries are merely a reflection of what people “think they think” and not necessarily very sincere, and further, that the apparent “contradiction between the meaning of our actions toward a person and what we say we feel toward that person in a journal” is not because “what we do is shallow, and only what we confess to ourselves is deep.” Rather, Sontag proposes, “confessions, I mean sincere confessions of course, can be more shallow than actions.”

She goes on to note that she doesn’t feel guilty for reading Harriet’s diary because diaries are meant to have an audience even if they pretend to not want one: “One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal. Will Harriet ever read this?” This premise, of course, is self-serving and itself as performative as she claims diaries in general are—I struggle to take the ending note, “Will Harriet ever read this?” seriously. It seems she may be writing in the hopes that Harriet will. But the idea is nevertheless intriguing: Not only are diaries not actually private, they are also not necessarily even full of truths.

I had never before considered that the “privacy” of my diary had been a mere conceit, that perhaps it really was as the Girl Tech commercials of my youth (and Sontag) had insisted: being read is exactly what diaries are for.

Sarah Manguso’s 2015 book, Ongoingness, is about the diary she began keeping as a teenager, and maintained rigorously from then on. She explains her diary-keeping as a way to insist on a kind of control over the passage of time: “Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.” Though Ongoingness contains some very short scenes from Manguso’s life, some directly related to the diary and some not, she never quotes from the diary itself in the book, which instead is made up of taut fragments that seem intended to push against the exhaustiveness of the diary. There is a sort of anti-confession here, the refusal to display anything fleshly, sticking only to the cerebral.

In one uncharacteristically revealing fragment, she describes what happened when a boyfriend read her diary, which at the time was kept as a massive document on her computer: He left her a note that “represented the act [of reading her diary] as a gesture of compassion, since I so clearly needed his expert help in evolving into a better person. He’d just learned, among other things, that I could barely feel him inside me.” In Manguso’s telling, the boyfriend appoints himself as interpreter (and fixer) of all the things that he realizes are wrong with her after he’s read what is ostensibly her most honest work—her diary. (There’s also the issue of his hurt feelings, of course.)

Using the term “confessional” to describe a work does something like what Manguso’s boyfriend did: it not only imagines the writer as exactly equivalent with the speaker, it also invites comparison to our broader notions of confession: religion, police interrogation, therapy. All of those contexts rely on an unequal power relationship: the listener (priest, analyst, cop) is in a hermeneutic role, making sense of a confessor’s raw revelation. To call writing “confessional” frames the writer as an artless conveyor, rather than as an author; one who merely records things, rather than creates them. And these assumptions come directly out of the association of the private with the feminine. But if we reflect on the actual history of diaries, the way they have always engaged in that crossing of the public-private line, we might stumble onto a different way to think about this genre of women’s writing; instead of “diaristic” or “confessional,” I would call it Girl Tech.

“The technology of silence … Silence can be a plan / rigorously executed … it has a history a form,” wrote the poet Adrienne Rich, whose own work has been grouped as confessional (a designation she, too, disliked: “We found ourselves / reduced to I”). Just as silence, while seemingly a lack, can be a tool, revelation, seemingly a compulsion, can be a strategy. The technology of confession: that’s Girl Tech. It is the appeal to an audience’s prurient curiosity; revelation, or the promise of it; writing as if no one will read it but precisely for the purpose of being read. In some ways, it’s just writing: shaping personal narrative using the tools of literature and the understanding of your audience, knowing how to titillate and when to withhold, having a vision in mind for how you want a reader to see you. But Girl Tech does this all while maintaining the impression that it is not doing that; the writing looks like a confession while really being a construction.

What I’m doing in this essay could be seen as hyper-confessional, hyper-female: diary girl writes about her boyfriend reading her diary and finding out her treacherous sex thoughts. This is the kind of threat of the private that Sontag, for example, was trying to make sense of, to talk herself out of accepting so that she didn’t have to feel hurt. Or it’s what Charles Buller was referring to when he said, regarding the Duchess de Praslin’s murder by her husband in 1847, a crime that led in part to the February Revolution: “What could a poor fellow do with a wife who kept a journal but murder her?”

I’ve parceled out the details of what happened when my boyfriend read my diary in the hopes that teasing something juicy would make you want to read more, but I don’t mean to shame you for your interest. I’m simply demonstrating the effectiveness of using intimate details, things assumed to be private, in the service of an idea; in other words, the effectiveness of Girl Tech.

After he told me he’d been reading my diary, my boyfriend said that, though it had been painful, he wasn’t exactly mad at me for what he found there. You wrote it because it was temporary. Temporary, yes, and I’d add that what I wrote was just one version of the story of that time, the one that I thought needed to be written. So by reading my diary he gained some insight into what I’d been wrestling with, but he didn’t necessarily get any closer to a truth than he’d already gotten by observing my behavior. That was four years ago now. Over the past few months, as I read my collection of old diaries while writing this essay, I left them lying around the apartment. That boyfriend, now my husband, picked one up and was immediately as hooked as I’d been. We’ve spent the past few weeks referencing things I wrote when I was 15, quoting hilariously angsty lines at each other, tracing down the lineages of current neuroses. I wrote those things down because they were temporary; but with a new reader they come back to life.

I’ve come to think of the diary as a secular version of my childhood nightly prayers. I don’t mean that writing in one is like praying in that it’s an act of faith or devotion, though I can imagine someone believing that, nor do I mean that it’s an attempt at forgiveness or redemption. I mean that doing so allows me to account for myself on a regular basis, to present myself as something comprehensible through time, to construct myself. It is a way of self-fashioning, self-historicizing. The only way that I know to do that is to externalize, to imagine the gaze of another. You have to step outside of your own head for sense-making; you can’t see yourself from point-blank. So in those prayers, I accounted for myself to God: this is what happened today, this is what I did, here is how I think I measured up. In a diary I write myself into existence: this is torturing me, these are all the possible ways to think through it. I imagine someone is watching, listening, reading so that I have the opportunity to explain myself; that is, to exist. Even or especially here: Just like when my boyfriend read my diary, this only exists because of you.