Why Keep Notebooks?

By way of Joan Didion

What is the point of writing in notebooks? Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem tells us it’s to remember what it was like to be you.

Not in a cringe way. You don’t need writing to self-deprecate. Your mind does plenty of that, and if you’re like me, it’s probably on a daily basis and comes uninvited in the form of an embarrassing memory from when you were slightly more stupid than you are now, or thanks to a hideous photograph that reminds you the world does well to insist on tailored clothing and professional haircuts without homemade bowl-cut bangs.

Not in a way that forces you to sit down with a prompt á la morning pages, either. We already have more than a handful of online creatives out there whose first pitstop on the path to self-discovery always happens to be the line, “I started writing morning pages this year, you guys, and it changed my life.”

And most certainly not in a way that’s formulaically designed to sabotage you into thinking life is a bottom feeder of regrets and sorrows and mistakes. We can reserve those forms of “Dear Diary” to our middle-school selves.

“Remember what it was like to be me. That is always the point,”

says Didion, matter-of-factly.

What does that mean, exactly?

She continues,

“I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering at the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them.”

Ah, there we go. An activity—keeping notebooks—that is neither prompted nor performative.