In Praise Of Diary Keeping

Betsy Rubiner with reporter Nelani Mejias, who is an alum of the Arts Paper's Youth Arts Journalism Initiative. Contributed Photo. 

Before Betsy Rubiner ever had a byline, or a travel blog, or a book and then another, she had a diary. Now, she’s making the case for why others might want to keep a faithful record of their lives, too.

The author of Our Diaries, Ourselves: How Diarists Chronicle Their Lives and Document Our World, Rubiner brought that message to New Haven on a recent Thursday, as she paid a surprise visit to Possible Futures book space on Edgewood Avenue. In an interview with this reporter—and of course, in her book, which came out in late February—she exhorted the values of diary-keeping, and shared a little about what she learned in the process of writing the book.

“The diary was a place where I could be myself,” said Rubiner, when asked how she stays honest in her diary entries. While the act of writing can sometimes “feel like someone is looking over your shoulder,” for her, it’s well worth it.

“If you clam up, what’s the point of writing?”

That’s central to the book itself, which was inspired in part by the author’s choice to donate her diaries after five decades of daily writing practice. A few years ago, Rubiner made the decision to give the diaries to a women’s archive, to be sealed for a time before being used as a landmark of history.

Alongside that decision, it was important to her to have a written record on why people keep diaries, and for how long they’ve been doing it.

That’s exactly what she’s set out to do in her new book. In Our Diaries, Ourselves, Rubiner blends journalistic curiosity and biographical experience. Even from the front cover, the autor is playing with the idea of what a “diary” is or can be: readers encounter 10 different snapshots arranged in a grid, from a yellow notebook with a lock on the cover to a rustic brown leather journal, worn composition notebook, and a green diary with a heart embossed on the cover. There’s even a digital diary, with a sleek stylus lying to one side.

Inside, readers follow Rubiner as she asks what a diary is (literally: her first section is titled “Questioning Assumptions”) and why the act of writing in a diary has become such an integral—and sometimes maligned or stereotyped—part of human history.

“Diaries are misunderstood, underrated, and disrespected often because of their association with women,” Rubiner said. And yet, diary-keeping “crosses cultures and countries,” in a practice that has in many ways withstood both man-made borders and the test of time.

Battling her own preconceived notions of what counts as a diary—words like, “private” and “secret,”for instance—Rubiner explores the “dailiness” and “selfiness” that define keeping a diary, particularly as a marker of time. While some people argue that memoirs can be diaries, she lays out a distinguishable difference: a diary is focused on what comes next. A memoir is not.

“The distinguishing factor is that a diary is moving forward incrementally while a memoir is looking back,” said Rubiner. “A diary sculpts the future.”

Rubiner is also interested in a digital shift that has taken place, from pen and paper to blogs, videos, and journaling apps. Although those forms are often meant for (or more immediately accessible to) an audience, she said, the dailiness and the selfiness is there, and so they too are very much diary entries.

As she moves on to Part II (“Why We Write”) and Part III (“Why We Read Other People’s Diaries) of her book, Rubiner discusses the benefits diarists have in their practice and the mix of emotions that can come from reading other people's diaries. She is not especially interested in people zooming into her life, she added: she would rather this serve as an inspiration for readers to “pan out,” and reflect on what they can learn from a specific document.

“I hope it’ll give them insight into one particular life in one particular period,” she said.