A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries

For a reader who is considering or curious about reading diaries or a reader who knows already they love them, this is a perfect read. Mallon divides diarists into seven categories: chroniclers, travelers, pilgrims, creators, apologists, confessors, and prisoners and then proceeds for a few pages to pick out some salient features, a quote or two, before moving on to the next diary. He covers a lot of ground. His purpose isn't to tell you the whole story of a person, but just to give you a taste, so you will be left wondering, in some cases, what happened to that person, but the obvious answer is to go find out for yourself! I've read quite a few journals as it turns out, Boswell, Woolf, Nigel Nicolson, some Nin, to name a few. Of show more course, many journals stray into almost all of these categories, I know mine does, sometimes its just a depository of ideas for what I'm writing, sometimes I'm describing something in detail because it might be of interest many years from now, sometimes I'm trying to figure out an emotional problem, and so on. A fine quote within a quote from the intro: "J.M. Barrie once wrote that the "life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another . . " Another enjoyable facet was that Mallon includes mention of some diaries of fictional characters. It took me a long time to read as this sort of book does, I could only read about a few diarists at a time. I should add, this volume represents an incredible amount of work!**** show less

I enjoyed this one, but at the same time, there was something about Mallon's tone that made me glad he'll never be discussing any of my writing, diaristic or otherwise.

At the outset, I felt as though I had really hit on something inspirational and there were definitely "pull quotes" I captured. The middle part - especially the chapter called "Apologists" felt strained and overly academic. Could be be and a lack of receptivity. I also found that when the author drifted back in time that I was less interested than vignettes from the 1800s forward. Not sure why.

I wish I knew when I first read this book and how often I have reread it. If my handwritten journals were indexed I could find out. But that was before PC's and before LT.
It is a wonderful selections of bits of journals focused on why and how the people wrote, what they got out of the process.
Wrote more about it in my blog http://janientrelac.blogspot.com/

A book about diarists and excerpts from diaries. Good for researching for other writers - not a book for reading cover to cover, but useful.

Thomas Mallon's survey of diarists throughout the ages introduces us to the most personal writings of more than 100 diarists, including Samuel Pepys, Leonardo da Vinci, Virginia Woolf, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Mallon divides the diarists into seven categories--chroniclers, travelers, pilgrims, creators, apologists, confessors, and prisoners--that he uses as a basis for his inquiries into the nature of these apparently private writings

An anthology of diaries told mainly in the anthologist's own words.