“Could it be that a hitherto unrecognized literary law dictates that the less a person expects others to read a diary, the more interesting it will be?”
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As I was riffling through the boxes of cuttings in the attic, I was startled to discover this piece from 1992 about writing diaries, which I had completely forgotten about. I thought how weird it was that I wrote the sentence above (which I have inserted in a manner of a literary novelist, adding an earnest aperçu at the start as if to point the reader in the right direction, while showing off), because honestly, if I’d known so many people were going to end up reading Bridget Jones’s Diary I would never have dared to write any of it.
Now, though, as I sit, calm and Zen-like with a scented candle, smugly studying my own oeuvres, I wonder, had I been secretly fermenting the notion of writing a diary for years, like a vat of hops beginning to turn into beer?
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Dear Diary: don’t tell a soul…
Sunday Times, 16 August 1992
Last week the humiliation of Mike Tyson continued as one of his bodyguards revealed on American TV that, at Tyson’s request, he had kept a computerized diary of the boxer’s conquests, covering names, dates and details of sexual encounters with 1,300 women (not including one-night stands).
Those people who don’t destroy their diaries must have some secret need or wish for them to be read.
The South African journalist Jani Allan might well have found herself £300,000 better off this week if she hadn’t thought fit to keep a diary of sexual exploits (imaginary or otherwise). “It was heaven. We were stoned. We made love twice,” is not the sort of phrase you want turning up in your handwriting about a married Italian pilot when you are trying to win a libel case by saying you don’t have affairs with married men.
And what of the Taylor sisters, jailed for life in July for the murder of Alison Shaughnessy after extracts were read out in court from a diary written by Michelle Taylor, who was having an affair with Shaughnessy’s husband? “I hate Alison, the unwashed bitch,” she wrote. “My dream solution would be for Alison to disappear as if she never existed.”
“Keep a diary and it will keep you,” is the popular phrase coined by Mae West. Keep a diary and it will keep you in prison or penury seems to be more to the point.
“Tuesday— stabbed Binky to death— that’ll teach him! Felt great. Hid murder weapon in back of wardrobe. Wednesday, slept with wife’s younger sister— blimey! Hope she doesn’t find out!!”
Why on earth are people so insane as to write these things down? When the general public is willing to pay upwards of £14.95 to read some dreary politician’s pompously self-aware journal, when even The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady is one of the biggest-selling books the country has ever known, other than the Bible, isn’t it obvious that nobody will be able to resist a diary full of secrets absolutely free—even if it doesn’t have pictures of hedge wortle in it.
Recent history is littered with diaritic disasters. In 1979, a 35-year- old Hampshire woman went down for two and a half years with her reputation somewhat tarnished after police broke into her flat, looked under her bed and found diaries containing fantastically detailed accounts not only of all the things she had been nicking from local shops, but the 51 men she had slept with over the past year, cross referenced with a list of the number of times she made love each week and star ratings for the likes of “Richard the Teenager” and “Ugly Ali.”
The year before, a schoolgirl got into very hot water over comments in her diary about her English teacher. “I have lost my virginity to him, but who cares?” she mused.
Writing a brief and to-the-point diary, reminding you what you are supposed to be doing, or what you did, is perfectly normal and useful. But murder, adultery, rogering of schoolteachers and large-scale frauds do not need to be included because, even when planned well in advance, they are seldom the sort of thing which slips the mind.
It is the other confessional Dear Diary outpouring job which is the baffling one. I started doing one briefly on my home computer, as much to avoid getting on with my work as anything, filing it craftily under Gas Bills, with a decoy file called Diary, Strictly Private which, inside, said only: “Hahahaha don’t be so nosy.”
It played on my mind, though, ticking away in there like a time bomb. What if the computer accidentally faxed it to the office? What if I died and somebody found it while trying to get a rebate from the gas board?
Eventually, I’d had enough and wiped it—rather, I fancied, in the manner of the writer Anthony Trollope, who kept diaries for 10 years then destroyed them, writing (presumably in his new diary), “They convicted me of folly, ignorance, indiscretion, idleness, extravagance and conceit.” (Is that all? Huh!)
A diary is the perfect medium for subtle propaganda, with all manner of dull nonsense masquerading as honest unselfconscious outpourings.
Those people who don’t destroy their diaries must have some secret need or wish for them to be read, a need or wish which affects what is written in varying degrees. At one end of the spectrum is the therapeutic confessional, where the need or wish is a subconscious, complicated thing; at the other end is the diary of the politician or other public figure, where the need or wish—to be read—is the whole point of writing the thing in the first place.
But could it be that a hitherto unrecognized literary law dictates that the less a person expects others to read a diary, the more interesting it will be?
Political diaries certainly prove the point. It would be rare to find political memoirs declaring the likes of “Virginia said hello to me today. She has fantastic breasts. I hate Peter Bottomley. My dream scenario is for him to disappear as if he never existed, the unwashed bastard.”
For politicians, thoughts seem to pop out perfectly grammatically formed and groomed to show the writer in the best possible light. A diary is the perfect medium for subtle propaganda, with all manner of dull nonsense masquerading as honest unselfconscious outpourings.
But if the literary law was a good one, then my recently discovered university diary would be fantastically interesting. I certainly never considered it being read by others. This is what it contained on page after page:
Yogurt 90
Celery (2 sticks) 10
Carrots (3) 33
Egg 75
Cottage cheese 100
Pickle 10
Celery (4 sticks) 20
Box of Milk Tray 2,000
Carrots (2) 22
Chelsea buns (3) 750
Pizza 800
Chips 400
Chocolate fudge cake 380
Coffee (black) 0
A case of keep a diary and one day it will keep you in a mental institution.
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I haven’t been locked up yet, but the night is still young… so to speak.
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From Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, published by Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. “Dear Diary: don’t tell a soul…“ Copyright © 1992 by Helen Fielding. Originally published in the Sunday Times.
