Using Old Diary Entries to Piece Together a Memoir
Writing a diary is not the same as writing a memoir and yet, for me, they are so intertwined that I could practically coin a new genre, “Diarmemoir.” I could not have written my memoir Solace, nor its predecessor Missing, without having written daily diary pages for many years.
(How to Turn Artifacts and Research Into a Family Memoir.)
First, because my memoirs, like most memoirs, are about the experiences and feelings drawn from a particular period of time in one’s life which may no longer exist in in the present; and second, because I could not have remembered those very different stages of life in their specificity and vivid detail had I not kept a daily diary.
Having begun my daily diaries when I was 34 years old, I am currently writing diary number 270 when I am 78. How, you may ask, could I possibly have even read back into all those pages, much less made any use of them? I’ve had a method. Always numbering and dating each volume (both start date and end date), after I finish a diary I read it over.
Life being constant change, I am continually surprised at how quickly one forgets what seemed of large importance only one week or one month ago. Yet I have also seen how certain themes repeat themselves. It’s kind of like fishing. Reading back in a diary is like dropping the line into the water, and what you catch can be surprising.
When I “catch” something—a few words, a phrase, or a page—I write it down, and so, diary by diary, I accumulate writing that I can review, think about, write more about, or discard. It is like having a cupboard full of writing prompts. And the most useful thing I have learned is that without having written and then read over a diary, I would never have been able to recreate a scene with the details that are effortlessly present in a diary, in which I was simply talking to myself, with pen on paper, not “writing something.”
That voice in a diary is your own natural style, without self-consciousness. Later, you can shape and change it—perhaps the whole process could be compared to making a sparkling stone out of what looks initially like a piece of rock—the original diary entry being the rock, albeit with flashes of light—and the finished, buffed, polished memoir being the diamond.
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Diaries, of course, must be written chronologically. It is this changing of circumstances and feelings and experiences, over time, that give diaries their unique value to you as portraits of your life in a glance—those daily entries are like a photograph album, and also provide tailor-made writing prompts.
Though I remember the emotions I experienced after my daughter had left for college, I would have forgotten, had I not had a diary to read over, most, if not all, of the details which I later used in Solace: “The green curtains in our bedroom dim the room so pleasantly; fresh air billows them slightly. The sound of children playing in the neighborhood drifts in, comforting and faint. Beyond our bedroom door our house stands empty and private, lamps burning in our rooms.”
Graham Greene in his novel Our Man of Havana, says to someone who is grieving, “You were interested in a person, not in life, and people die, or leave us, but if you are interested in life, it never lets you down.” The transmutation of a few sentences in a diary written 27 years earlier becomes a part of a memoir that can speak to others who are now experiencing a similar feeling, and, perhaps, bring solace.
Check out Cornelia Maude Spelman’s Solace here:
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