Dear Diary...

I’ve only kept one diary throughout my life. It is a little dark blue book—which I covered in the most random stickers imaginable—with a broken lock that refused to shut. I kept it closed with a pink hair elastic, which has also since snapped in half. So much for privacy. I wrote in it sporadically from April 11, 2001 to December 23, 2004, from ages 9 to 13. Apparently, the most important information for me to document on that first page was (1) that I was listening to the radio and (2) a list of 3 guys I loved. Sorry, liked. Though I later scratched out the third boy, not because I had changed my mind: at some point, I went into my diary and made a series of redactions. My cousin and I had agreed to swap diaries and mark certain pages that were approved for reading. Clearly, while I was privately ready to admit my third crush, I wasn’t ready to do so publicly. Neither was I ready for her to know that I loved people. The shame.

Later, in high school, I would redact an important part of my diary in case anyone tried to read it. Though technically meant for my eyes only, my writing was haunted by a possible outside reader.

I modelled my own writing on the fictional diaries I devoured as a kid and preteen. I documented the people I met, the friends I made and lost, and how life made me feel. Like many diaries before, the pages hold both the real and imagined: things I thought, but did not know; things I invented for myself out of a need for self-confidence and hope; and many, many delusions about the objects of my crushes. As Steven E. Kagle and Lorenza Gramegna write in “Rewriting Her Life: Fictionalization and the Use of Fictional Models in Early American Women’s Diaries”:

I was making my own myths. No one was reading my diary (I think… at least, I hope). But I was reading Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s Two of a Kind: Diaries, the Royal Diaries, Dear Canada, and other favourites like Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging. Each series served its own purpose in the early-2000s Girl Power era. These books projected a particular vision for girlhood, and the place of girls in the political, cultural, social, and civic spheres. Inevitably, my peers and I drew from this vision as we crafted our own narratives.

“[I]n their diaries,” explains Judy Simons in “Invented Lives: Textuality and Power in Early Women’s Diaries,” “women write scripts for themselves, erotic, domestic, maternal or martyred, that transpose fictional female stereotypes onto their own lives.” Therefore, as we write ourselves, we navigate between fact and fiction. Many scholars have analysed the tension between writing of the self as both an act of ultimate freedom and of constraint, particularly present in women and girls’ diaries. The private page is liberating: women and girls can document and imagine their lives and themselves, seemingly without limitations. But our little books are then locked and hidden away.

Dear Diary, where did you come from?

A long history of documenting our activities, thoughts, and feelings predates the era of the password-protected journal keeping girls’ secrets safe from younger brothers and moms. Because, yes, it was always the little brothers and moms who went snooping.

The earliest surviving diaries come from Middle Eastern and East Asian cultures; the diary of Merer, for example, dates as far back as the 26th century BCE. Written by men, these texts were often records of daily business or activity before developing into a version of the chronological tools for self-reflection we know today. In the sixteenth century, European philosophers emphasized men’s potential for growth and self-sufficiency. Contemporaneously, the Protestant Reformation (1517 to 1648) created a work ethic so toxic that it continues to plague us to this day. Tying hard work, frugality, and discipline to moral goodness and godly devotion, the Protestant work ethic bound individuals to their labour. Turning away from what they saw as an irredeemably corrupt Catholic Church, Protestants, instead, focused on fostering individual relationships with God (including through hard work). Nationalist ideology, which also required dutiful and productive citizens in order to flourish, benefited from this approach to life and labour. (This will come up again later.) This context brought moral weight and value to the journey for self-improvement. The diary became a tool to track this, preparing “the way for autobiography of all kinds.” 

Through modern autobiographical diary practices, we seek to make sense of the world around us and our place within it. Diary-writing, according to Marcos José Bernal Marcos, Tania Zittoun, and Alex Gillespie, lies “halfway between the social world around us and our own way of thinking, feeling, and perceiving.” Therefore, though private, diaries can be modes of connection, bringing into play “issues of historical, social, and self-construction,” allowing diarists to craft a text that blurs the boundaries between the individual and the collective. In “Writing the Self: Of Diaries and Weblogs,” José van Dijck even argues that diaries are an act of communication, necessarily written with an implicit reader in mind. Whether this reader is imaginary, the diary itself, god, or a wider public, the stories on the page are addressed to someone other than the author.

Diarists write to these imagined readers when we seek to improve ourselves, encounter difficulties, create distance from a harsh reality, or picture the future. Diary-writing is now firmly a feminine activity, thanks to decades of pop culture representations starting in the 19th century. As Rebecca Steinitz argues in Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary: “While the spectrum of fictional diaries reproduced actual diary practices, fiction’s insistent focus on feminine diaries helped transform those practices. Ultimately, then,[...] fiction feminized the diary.” In the Scholastic book flyers of my childhood, diaries were pink, fuzzy, or glittery and marketed to girls. Janese Swanson’s brand, Girl Tech, made a name for itself by making “gadgets for girls,” like the Password Diary above. In a 1999 article for the New York Times, Michelle Slatalla described Swanson’s products: “Some of her recent toys [...] include the Door Pass, which sets off an alarm if anyone tries to sneak into its owner's bedroom, and the Beam-It flashlight, which works like a projector to flash written messages (e.g., ''I luv U 4-ever'') on a darkened wall.” 

Though Girl Tech’s line of gadgets “contradict[ed] a stereotype: no pink, no dolls, no ponies,” it did so by leaning into another one—that all girls have secrets that need to be kept private at all costs.

Of course, there is nuance. In elementary school, my three best friends and I saw ourselves reflected in the characters from The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. As we reached our final year together (most of us would be going to different high schools), we decided to take that inspiration further: we held a ceremony in a closet, promising to be friends forever. To formalize that pact and make sure that we stayed in touch, we got a joint diary, which each person would keep for two weeks of summer vacation. 

We trusted each other. That privilege was earned, just like with my cousin. However, I did not write the same way in this diary as I did in my own. Despite the deep bond of friendship between us, my friends were still an outside audience. There were, actually, secrets that I felt should be meant just for me.

Perhaps that’s why, when our diaries are published (like those of Anne Frank or Virginia Woolf), we clamour to read them: many of the most widely read diaries were written by girls and women. We learn to be self-reflective and channel that self-consciousness inwards; we hide our true selves from everyone but the page. Then all that is packaged as a bestseller, often posthumously. The interiority of these girls and women, who so often exist within the margins of history, is easily consumed once contained in published diary format; is this because we are unwilling to grapple with the complexity of their existence when they are alive? 

Dear Diary, what are you hiding?

Like many a young girl interested in history, I devoured the fictionalized “diaries” of the princesses and queens of the past. Finding them particularly convincing due to the family trees and historical appendices included at the end, I even once used the Royal Diaries’ Marie Antoinette, Princess of Versailles (2000) as a source for an elementary school project. Yikes.

Other historical fiction in diary format, like the Dear Canada and Dear America series, helped cast diaries as the “heritage of girls.” In most of these texts, notes Nancy Huse, the blank diary is passed on to the girl by her mother, aunt, or grandmother. Further, the fictional diary develops what she calls “themes of female language,” by including references to novels like Little Women, Jane Eyre, and Anne of Green Gables. These are meant to relate to the fictional female diarist, as well as her (assumed) female reader. In this literary heritage, history, lived reality, and fiction feed into each other, affecting both the characters on the page and the reader in her bedroom.

As for the Dear America/Dear Canada series, while the fictional girls witness historical events of national importance, readers learn about these events (maybe for the first time) through the narrators’ words. They become, then, political agents, helping to craft the national narratives we readers are supposed to identify with. As Johnson asks, who better to observe life than the “diarist trained to silence”? In these stories, girls both observe history from the margins while taking centre stage in their personal experiences. 

Journalist Amy Weiss-Meyer remembers how the Dear America series helped her better understand how people—specifically, young girls like her—move forward after witnessing tragic historical events. She started reading the series soon after 9/11:

While these fictional diaries reinforced the importance of both the mundane and the cataclysmic, they have also been criticized for presenting a whitewashed version of history, a new kind of fiction in and of itself. Canada, and other colonial states, use storytelling to employ history as a tool for naturalizing the place of white settlers on this stolen land. Though the Dear Canada and Dear America series did include some BIPOC diarists, the vast majority of their heroines were white settlers. The series do offer a different perspective on Canadian history—that of a young girl—, but they still assume a white “standard.” 

In “Girls, Animals, Fear, and the Iterative Force of the National Pack: Reading the Dear Canada Series,” Charlie Peters argues: “Throughout the [Dear Canada] series, the girl diarists do the work of producing the sense of a shared existence across time that is needed for imagining the nation-state into being.” Nations depend on our belief in these shared myths and stories to create a sense of belonging. Finally, in her thesis, “Gender, Race, and Nation in the Dear America Series,” Kali Furman found that “girlhood is constructed through the performance of daily feminized labor, heteronormativity, and resistance. Nation is constructed in the texts through a focus on foundational myths [...], as well as on racial hierarchies, and the rhetoric of individual persistence despite difficult situations.” Whatever they are going through, no matter how vastly different from our own lived realities, we are meant to identify with our diarists through the timelessness of the nation and the timelessness of girlhood.

There is an established bibliography of girlhood; there is a specific language for writing girlhood. Though a princess engaged to the future king of France, Marie-Antoinette still “wrote” about her nosy mom, her cherished sister, her insecurities, and tensions with those who continuously told her she was “not yet ready to be a Dauphine, let alone a Queen.” Pop culture royalty Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen published their own “diaries,” with stories full of frenemies, secrets, and the boys they crushed on. Both taught me what I should write about in mine. Like Marie-Antoinette, I would make lists of the topics I needed to discuss, as a promise to my diary and a reminder to myself. As she described her family members for the benefit of the reader, I described my own so my diary could “get to know them.” Was I envisioning a reader, too? Perhaps myself in the future? Or was this the only way I knew to write in diaries?

Having crushes is central to my diary because, yes, I did go through a lot of crushes, but so did the Olsens! Just like theirs, my entries are full of overanalyses of my interactions with the objects of my affections. But while the Olsens went to sleepaway camps, snuck out after hours, went on non-supervised vacations, I didn’t have the same adventures to write about. So I invented them–not in my diary, but a separate notebook I kept for these fictional first-person stories where I did mundane things like kiss a secret crush. Fortunately for me now, those pages have been ripped up and have probably decomposed somewhere, if they haven’t been recycled into a new notebook to house some other girl’s fantasies.

Perhaps girls and women turn to diaries—including fictional ones, maybe sometimes only fictional ones—to learn, to see ourselves, to fill in historical gaps where we weren’t included in the first place. Interestingly, while fictional female diarists wrote to their nations (“Dear Canada,” “Dear America,”), boys embodied them: the less popular “boy” iterations of these historical fictions were literally called My Name is America. But these were not called diaries; they were journals. Whether you believe there is a difference or not, My Name is America’s marketing team clearly believed that a male readership was not interested in diaries. 

As I got older, I tried to make meaning out of my life experiences by writing lessons, like morals to a story, at the end of my entries. The authors of fictional diaries did the much same as their heroines matured, faced challenges, or experienced life-changing events. I’m truly hollering at myself thinking I had figured out life at 13: better to be happy than depressed!! But finishing the diary was a milestone and I felt like I had to mark that with some meaningful, final reflection, like the end of a book.

Dear Diary, bye for now!

The Girls’ Diary Project: Writing Ourselves into Being by Shannon McFerran and Daniel G. Scott was a five-year participatory research project published in 2013. Their study of original diary content unpacks, in discussion with the diarists themselves, the way these “little locked books are actually a source for understanding how a girl creates her self, unites her inner and outer experience, and guides herself into maturity and a sense of wholeness through a creative process.” I understand creative both in the sense that we create intimate narratives of our own lives, but also because the way we do so is shaped by both the facts we learn, and fictions we consume, about girlhood. 

I grew up in the era of Girl Power (and Riot grrrl, but my age made me much more susceptible to the Spice Girls than Bikini Kill). These representations “are then recycled, reshaped, and reworked,” part of that ever-evolving, yet constant, concept of girlhood: “[A]s girl power is relived by actual girls, it reveals itself as a ‘contradictory site’ that is both ‘constraining and liberating, productive and oppressive.’” When we write for ourselves, it is a practice of self-awareness, self-presentation, and self-preservation. Yet this solitary act also contributes to (and is affected by) collective knowledge and collective memory.

Having access to the pages that represent four formative years of my life, in that period of girlhood between childhood and teenagedoom, is a privilege. That little book is at the heart of these reflections, from the inside out. Written off as “sentimental, parochial, and [gasp] female,” girls’ diaries, both fact and fiction, are, in fact, fundamental and precious primary sources.

Go off, young scholar. 

Each newsletter is written by either Jac or Cass (hi!). In The Dish, this issue’s author asks the other (notyr)girl about what that month’s topic means to them.

Cass: What was your favourite fictional diary or dairy series, and why?

Jac: So much of Cass’s experience as a young teen paralleled my own. I have never been a consistent writer, whether for public or private consumption; I like to hold ideas close, let them ripen in the recesses of my ribcage before they are the ones who clamour to be let loose into the world.

But as a youth, I read as many Royal Diaries as I could get my hands on, absolutely captured by these fictionalized narratives of powerful women living lives beyond my reality but who were also somehow just like me. As a tween, I had a Little Mermaid-branded aqua green diary (also with a lockable clasp) with unlined pages that I scribbled in, surely in imitation of these diaries.

My received ideas of what it means to be ‘writerly’ are encapsulated by the character of Jo in Little Women. In the 2019 film adaptation (released when I was well into adulthood), there is a scene where Saoirse Ronan’s Jo furiously writes page after page, ink stains be damned, until finally her book is complete and bound. Watching that scene, I felt that small thrill again of—oh yes, the consumptive energy of the writer-girl, in a flurry of creation, oblivious to the world around her. I have wanted to tap into that energy since I was a child, and this is how I learned it was supposed to look like.

As a teen, I was ever unsatisfied with my occasional personal scribbling, on account of my inconsistency and my too-messy handwriting, which did not correspond to this writer-girl ideal I had already formed. From a diary I progressed to a sketchbook, covered with punk band stickers, housing journal entries but also lyrics to the songs I wrote with my friends, and heartfelt adolescent poetry. It was a private refuge but I recall wanting to take up the posture of the precocious intellectual, brimming with insight into the world that just needed to be captured; this was one way to do it.

These personal writings, as archives of our selves, synthesize received messaging about who girls are and supposed to be — and we are performing that even in the pages meant only for ourselves.

During the pandemic I briefly moved back in with my parents, who (much to my mother’s annoyance) were still storing boxes and boxes of my childhood books. With nothing else to do on lockdown evenings, I sat in my childhood bedroom, looking at the Royal Diaries with fresh eyes (and a master’s in gender history under my belt).

I fondly returned to the story of Elizabeth I, the first of the series I ever read. The princess was depicted by author Kathryn Lasky as a fiery and bright young mind, at the mercy of courtly political machinations, and always desperate for her father’s love.

Five years later, I am now reading Elizabeth’s Royal Diary with my partner’s eldest daughter, who is 10. For her, the book is a portal into history, much more gripping than the textbooks she is assigned at school.

I take joy in sharing this formative childhood experience with her. I’m also mindful of the often whitewashed versions of history presented through these pages. (It is easy to conjure sympathy for say, a young Queen Victoria, especially when reading her “diary” as a child who may not be aware of Victoria’s role as Grandmother of the British Empire).

Essays like Cassandra’s help clarify my thinking about the additional conversations to be had with my stepdaughters. I can love and treasure these diaries while also attuning to the ways in which girlhood, especially white girlhood, can be weaponized in service of nationalism and empire.