Book Review: The New Diary — October Memoir Challenge
This is my twenty-fourth post, for age 24, of the October Memoir and Backstory Challenge hosted by Jane Anne McLachlan. My previous posts: Baby Speed Eater, Two Tales, Curls, Most Magical Christmas, Kindergarten, Places, Mental Health in 1969, The Boxcar Children, The Little House Books, Too Thin, Four Square, Curls: Take Two, Scouting, Schools, Sophomore Year, 1979 Book Review, Library Assistant, College Food, Dear Santa, The Muny, College Graduate, First Job, and Cancer.
In 1986, I married the guy I shouldn’t have married (see College Graduate). Of course, I was happy on my wedding day, but it’s all colored in shades of red and gray now by what happened later.
So, I’m going to write about a longer term relationship that started shortly after the wedding — with my journal.
Book: The New Diary by Tristine Rainer
Genre: writing / self help
Publisher: Jeremy P. Tarcher
Publication date: 1978
Pages: 315
Source: a bookstore in LA where we stopped for an overnight on the way home from the honeymoon in New Zealand (yeah, the honeymoon was cool but apparently the ex got the photos in the divorce because I don’t seem to have any).
Summary: In The New Diary, Tristine Rainer advocates keeping a free-form, loosely-structured journal, very different from the page-a-day diary I had as a kid. The New Diary “has little to do with outdated notions and misconceptions of diary keeping as self-discipline, a dutiful record of events, a narcissistic self-absorption, an escape from reality, or a nostalgic adherence to the past.” For Rainer, the journal can be a creative and therapeutic space for exploring thoughts and emotions in a myriad of ways with a variety of techniques: sketches, clippings, dialogues, lists or any other form that suits the moment.
Thoughts: The New Diary changed my life. It may have saved my life. After all, my cancer never recurred. In spite of all my aborted efforts at previous journal-keeping, I started working with The New Diary using a bound artist’s sketchbook as suggested and never really stopped. I wrote 44 volumes over 24 years before I finally switched to the computer for my journaling.
Using The New Diary, I embraced and then moved beyond my identity as a cancer survivor, I coped with the break up of my marriage, and I mapped a new path for my life:
The diary is the genre of the present moment. And on the continuum of time between past and future, the present moment is the point of power from which you can influence the meaning and direction of your life. (p. 229)
My journal has been a companion when I was lonely, a counselor when I was angry or afraid, and a coach when I was confused. Between those black covers, I wrote papers, dreams, plans, rants, and raves. I’m a nicer person because my journal keeps my mean thoughts secret. I’m a happier person because my journal feels no pain when I rupture cathartic feelings on to its pages.
Appeal: The New Diary by Tristine Rainer is for any one who has ever kept or thought of keeping a journal.
What book made the biggest difference in your life?
So nice Joy. I haven’t ever been able to keep a diary…absolutely no discipline. I did read The Artist’s Way and have been doing the automatic writing here and there for months, years, but sometimes only days till I give it up for a while. I like sketchbooks though. I sketch and write and stick things in them and keep a sort of multi-purpose scrap book of ideas and life. Funny though, I made my children keep travel journals (sketchbooks usually) for trips and thru summers or years abroad and the kids think these are treasures to them now. So that was one idea which worked.
Tristine Rainer would call “a sort of multi-purpose scrap book of ideas and life” a New Diary for sure!
I’ve started – and quit – journaling so many times I can’t even tell you. This sounds like a book I should check out.
I’ve been keeping journals since I was 8. I don’t see them as failures. I see them as friends that I visit and revisit when needed. Like you, Joy, they can be companionship or counselor or just a way to get my pen moving. After all these decades, it’s hard to think of them as abandoned projects because of the sheer weight of them. They are picture albums, just with a pen not shot with a polaroid.
The New Diary was one of those books I had on my shelves that I never got around to reading. I don’t have it any more – it was a victim of the big book purge we went through when we moved to the city last year. Now I know I’ve got to read it! I’ll check the library – hopefully they’ll have a copy. I’m like Kathy – I’ve tried journaling so many times but can’t seem to stick with it. I like the sound of The New Diary – the free form method doesn’t sound constricting at all. Another method I’ve been wanting to try is the one that Linda Barry talks about in What It Is, but I hadn’t been certain I could keep up her format on a daily basis. It sounds like I could use it in a free form kind of diary, though!
A very interesting post. The closest I came to keeping a diary was Morning Pages after reading The Artists Way. Fortunately, I was still in that habit when I had my car accident, because I’ve relied on them heavily to write my Memoir, “Impact: A Memoir of a Car Crash and PTSD”
If anything intense happens to me again, I plan to keep a daily account of it, in case I ever want to write about it.
Jane Ann
http://www.janeannmclachlan.com
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I really want to check this book out! My favorite journaling book that I have read so far is Leaving a Trace by Alexandra Johnson, but I am always on the lookout for more. Adding this one to my list for the library this week!