Dear Diary, I Hate You

I suspect that many people who don’t keep a diary worry that they ought to, and that, for some, the failure to do so is a source of fathomless self-loathing. What could be more worth remembering than one’s own life? Is there a good excuse for forgetting even a single day? Something like this anxiety seems to have prompted the poet and essayist Sarah Manguso, on the cusp of adulthood, to begin writing a journal, which she has kept ever since. “I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention,” she tells us early in her memoir “Ongoingness” (Graywolf). “Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.”

via Sarah Manguso’s “Ongoingness” – The New Yorker.