I was reading the forward to Julia Child’s book MY LIFE IN FRANCE when I came across Child’s gratitude-filled explanation of why she was able to write her memoir:
Our research has been aided immeasurably by a thick trove of family letters and datebooks kept from those days, along with Paul’s photographs, sketches, poems, and Valentine’s Day cards. Paul and his twin brother, Charlie Child, a painter who lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, wrote to each other every week or so. Paul took letter writing seriously: he’d set aside time for it, tried to document our day-to-day lives in a journalistic way, and usually wrote three to six pages a week in a beautiful flowing hand with a special fountain pen; often he included little sketches of places we’d visited, or photos (some of which we have used in these pages), or made mini-collages out of ticket stubs or newsprint. My letters were usually one or two pages, typed, and full of spelling mistakes, bad grammar, and excalamation points; I tended to focus on what I was cooking at the time, or the human dramas boiling around us. Written on thin pale-blue or white airmail paper, those hundreds of letters have survived the years in very good shape.
I stopped reading her forward right there and was lost in my realization of why I wasn’t too fond of the book that led me to this one–(sorry Ms. Powell), and other books of its kind built on and around blogs disguised as memoirs–???the writer’s awareness that he or she is writing “for posterity” or “for a gimmick.”
Whereas, personal diaries or personal letters often have that lack of larger-audience awareness that makes them so delicious and lovely to read. Don’t get me wrong–I do enjoy reading personal blogs and memoir-style blogs a great deal–I even keep one of my own; but even as I look back on some of my early blogging attempts (way back to livejournal for you computer geeks out there), I realize that I was so aware of someone else reading it that I was trying too hard to make them good. I shudder now to think that I was breaking the rule I teach all of my students never to break: write from a place of need, and the need’s gotta be deep.
Beyond this realization about self-aware, egoist blogs, I also realized that I haven’t gotten many letters lately. In 20 or 40 or 60 years in the future there probably won’t be letters or personal diaries to comb through; everyone is keeping a blog , so there’s this veil between the reader and the writer in the same way that there is no veil when I read something like The Journals of Sylvia Plath or The Diary of Anne Frank. Anne Frank and Sylvia Plath probably never thought their words would go beyond their own eyes–they wrote for themselves in order to understand their world and to understand how they felt–or to simply have someone to talk to outside of their own heads. That’s why reading those letters and those diary entries is such a singular experience; readers get an unfiltered view of the writer and the life of the writer. Slave narratives, suffragist letters, Captain’s logs, Darwin’s and Davinci’s notebooks–these and others like them have given readers a peek into worlds we wouldn’t otherwise know anything about.
There’s historical value hidden in lots of places. I absolutely love flipping through my great grandmother’s recipe box. She kept a box with little index cards that had recipes on them–and often times little notes on the recipe cards, like “made this for Sunday supper and Oda said it was too dry,” or “big hit at the church picnic; 2nd place ribbon,” or even “Kirsten’s favorite–she ate the whole stack.” (Pancakes with wild blackberries, if you must know). My great grandmother wasn’t a letter writer or a diary keeper, but she cooked a lot, and these little notes tell me a lot about who she was at a time when I either wasn’t around, or was too young to pay attention.
Those recipe cards, and old letters, and old diaries and journals are treasures. Even if I’m the only reader 20 years later, it’s so interesting to go through them and to read what I thought it important and valuable to share with someone else in a personal letter. After my father died, his wife gave me a box filled with all of the cards and letters I’d ever sent him. He saved everything. Example–I was a student ambassador to the USSR (when it was still the USSR) when I was younger, and I wrote my father letters on that papery-blue airmail stationary that Child speaks about (stationary I loved so much that I begged the flight attendants to give me all they had left at the end of each flight).
My letters to my dad describe the two KGB agents assigned to my ambassador group, and they describe the night my new sweetheart and I snuck outside at 2am and walked through Red Square, stopping to kiss on a bench in the rain; they also describe the 22 hour train ride I took through the countryside of Russia, being woken up by staff every 4 hours to drink hot, black tea with three sugars in it. I’m a bit surprised now, reading through these materials, at how honest I was with my father about my life and the things I was doing. There are poems and stories I sent him, and pictures, quick notes asking for money, a few leaves I stuffed into an envelope after I reached Alaska, a series of postcards I sent at each stop during a 3-month long road trip across the country by myself. Each document is a little time capsule. My diaries aren’t much more than self-indulgent and ego-centered rants from age 8 with my scrawling print and misspelled words, to age 14 with my cheerleading tryouts descriptions (oh yes, friends) and the repeated phrase “I think I’m in love with (insert boy’s name here.)” My letters and postcards, however–they are more reportage and journalistic. In those I share my life with my father in a way that is unfiltered and honest and real. This is why I love reading other people’s letters too–lack of filter.
It would’ve been different if email were around when I was 14 and 16 and 22. For some reason, emails aren’t all that inspiring when it comes to personal sharing–I mean, it’s so easy to pick up the phone or to shoot off a text message. Also, emails arrive immediately–and I can respond immediately. How would Rilke’s correspondence have changed if it were a series of emails instead of letters? On that cross-country road trip I took by myself there weren’t cell phones, and I had to have a lot of coins or a calling card to call home and ???check-in,’ so it wasn’t something I did every night. I planned a route and gave that plan to my parents, and then I sent them letters and postcards from the road–and in these letters and postcards I fancied myself a real adventurer–and I took time to describe the things I was seeing and the things I was feeling. These days I just call—but how wonderful it would be to get a letter.
So what about diaries then–if kids aren’t writing letters anymore, are they still keeping diaries? Probably not many of them. Case in point–my college students. One of the things I require in my composition and creative writing classes is daily writing in a journal. I never read it–I just count the pages once per week. We also write together in class on “topics” and often share out loud, but mainly I tell students that I just want them to get into the habit of writing, and writing by hand at that, so that they can connect more deeply with their real voices. See, I have this theory that we don’t get enough opportunity in our real lives to tap into our real, true voices–and that’s why so much writing by young people is self-conscious.
To my joy, one of my composition classes this past semester really took to the journal writing–so much so that if I ran out of time for us to write together in class they actually groaned and whined about it! And on the last day of class, one student said “this is our last time writing together” in this wistful way that made me sigh an end-of-semester teacher’s relief–as in “I did it! I got to them!” It was lovely to hear. Especially since so many of them said they had never really kept a diary or a journal before the class. It was even better when I said they could include anything they wanted in the journal–something that kept them writing even more. Some of my students said they’d continue writing in their journals–and I hope that’s true–but the fact that most had never even kept a journal or diary before–well, that doesn’t bode well for future historians and archivists.
My point here is that we should each write more, and take it seriously. I mean, if Julia’s husband Paul hadn’t written letters to his twin brother, maybe Julia wouldn’t have been able to finish her fantastic, witty, and charming memoir. Think of all of the other things we know, love, and understand because of “historical documents” like journals, diaries, and letters.Think of your historical value! The night President-elect Obama won, twitterers all over the internet were stating where they were and what they were feeling in that historical moment. What else have you experienced that would be important 60 years down the line? Whether it’s the quiet life of a teacher, or the more public life of a politician, I think it all probably has value to someone, somewhere, outside of ourselves, even if that “someone” is us just a few decades down the road.
Perhaps at the end of each day you could write a few sentences about what you did that day into your datebook?Or maybe you might keep a diary and write down every minute of your day; or if letters are more to your liking, pick someone you love whom you rarely talk to regularly and make it a New Year’s Resolution to write her or him a letter a week–a real letter, with stamps and everything. Or better yet, have your children write letters to family members–or have them keep their own diaries, or even more fun–get yourself a pen pal. No matter what you choose, keeping a daily record will change your life–and someday, may change someone else’s too.