Joan Didion, keeper of a notebook

Joan Didion, who died right before Christmas, wrote essays and kept a notebook.

Essays and notebooks are two of my preoccupations.

Her essay “On Keeping a Notebook” should be part of a writer’s education.

Recording accurate information is not exactly the point of keeping one, she said. 

“How it felt to be me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.”

You keep a notebook to remember what it was like to be you.

You change. You grow. You have trouble recalling what, exactly, you were thinking.

I’m one of those people who have a hard time distinguishing life from awareness.

It seems to me that a complete biography would be a record of what a person was paying attention to. And so it seems to me that a good keeper of notebooks — a Thoreau, a Kierkegaard, a Virginia Woolf — always produces something that is a little better than the best biography.