Alexandra Johnson

"The unexamined life is not worth living"
--Socrates

"Self-realization. I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "... I drank what?""
--Chris Knight, Real Genius

Whatever version of Socrates' wisdom you prefer, there's definitely something of value in keeping in a journal. Some published journals have never left print, revealing the lives and psychology of geniuses, ordinary people, people in moments of historic turmoil, and people with nothing more thrilling than the play of show more light in an almost empty room. Even if you aren't Virginia Woolf or Anne Frank, your descendants might wish to know who you were, you may wish to remember your youth when you're old.

I irregular keep a journal*, mostly as a pretext to write with fountain pens, and that journal is frankly, what Johnson identifies as the introspective whine, a psychological venting of spleen and complaints that I'd be embarrassed and terrified to show anybody else. The core of Johnson's practice is to focus first on sensation, then on memory, then on pattern and narrative. The specific sensory impression of a moment, like Proust's madeleine, acts as a trigger to a whole world of the cobwebbed past. And as the moments come alive again, you can see the choices you made in your life that, well, made your life. Each chapter is dotted with specific examples and closes with useful exercises. I hope they'll improve the quality of my journals.

*it also strikes me that in many way, my 1500+ book reviews over 10 years on this site are another journal, so thank you for reading along, friends. show less

I suppose I started reading this expecting that I would learn better how to tell stories in my own journal, which for the past few years I've kept more frequently than ever before. That is not this book's goal. Instead, think of it as a writer's resource: How can you plumb the depths of your own (or others') journals for writing fragments, sources, memories, senses? And how can those things find their way into your writing, whether as memoir, poetry, short stories, creative nonfiction? Where show more are there connections and themes in your life? How can you discover yourself in a way that can best be written about?

I will say that this is one of the most unique books-about-writing that I've read. It's also the one that has unblocked my own journaling, helping me to see beyond the factual record and whining about the things I desire but am not near, helping me to see the self that's under those themes and living more than those limitations might suggest.

The other curiosity here reminds me of a short story. Friends of mine are in a local indie band. One of their housemates has a habit of going to second hand stores and looking at the tape recorders and answering machines, and stealing the tapes from them. Those tapes he then either publishes to a blog, or snippets find their way into recorded music as 'found audio'. This book and that odd story have me curious to discover old journals at garage sales. And it has me asking around my family to see where my grandparents' journals have gone to after their deaths. I think they only recorded weather details, but what if there's more? What if my grandma secretly wrote about the challenge of keeping a marriage together through my grandpa's alcoholism and my dad and uncle's teenage rebellions? Or did either of them write about those horrible years when my dad - their youngest son - was diagnosed with the cancer that killed him before he turned fifty? Dad journaled some of that time. Did anybody else? show less

I really appreciated the way that Alexandra Johnson wrote this book. It’s not a workbook, or a seven point system to success, it is an exposition of what journals are. The author is a collector and researcher of journals of all shapes and sizes and she weaves examples from her collected journals into the text of the book to illustrate that each journal and journaling style is unique to the person writing. While she does have some helpful exercises, these take the back seat. The goal of show more this book is to inspire you to journal, not to tell you how to, or merely how to build a habit out of it. show less

As the title suggests, this is in fact a brief history of diaries; a very easy read if you have a couple of hours to kill, and would like to learn more about, well, diarists. There's not much more to say: Johnson gives us a couple of pages on the obvious (Pepys, Boswell), the well known (Darwin, Lewis & Clark, Thoreau), and selected authors (Burney, Mansfield, Woolf, Tolstoys). There were two surprises: first, the 'war diaries' section was given over primarily to women (Frank, Chestnut, show more Hillesum, Iris Origo), which worked very well. Second, the final chapter on 'cyberspace and digital diarists' is intellectually offensive: 12 or so pages about how LIKE THE INTERNET REVOLUTIONISES EVERYTHING AND NOW EVERYTHING IS GREAT BECAUSE WE'RE SHARING AND NOT ASHAMED YOU KNOW? Lest you think I'm exaggerating:

"Twenty-first-century diary keeping is now that perfect mix of confession, self-expression and moral improvement by sharing rather than concealing... Foursquare, a mobile social network, now allows users to tell others where they are located at that precise moment."

Goodbye, Virginia Woolf, today we have Foursquare--making the world a better... wait, does Foursquare even exist anymore? Apparently so. But it's not clear to me what any of this has to do with diaries.

More importantly, the Brief History is determinedly nominalist; no attempts to bring things together (except to point out how GREAT EVERYTHING IS TODAY), little attempt to link the use of diaries to anything outside of diaries. But that's just a reason to read more diaries, and books about diaries. Johnson's book certainly made me want to do that, which is no mean thing. show less