DEAR DIARY…

Twenty-five years since we first opened the pages of Bridget Jones’s Diary, we pay tribute to the diary keepers – both invented and real – whose recording of life in all its (v. good and v.v. mundane) minutiae continue to entertain, inform and help readers and writers alike.

Locked away in a drawer, emblazoned with stern warnings that prying eyes will be punished. Dare to peek inside your teenage diary and you’ll probably find proclamations of undying love for your big brother’s friend/the Saturday assistant in your local Spar/the new character on Coronation Street (IDST*), as well as excruciatingly detailed accounts of every single injustice that befell your teenage self, from Julie shoving past you in the school dinner queue and nabbing the last piece of sponge pudding ( how dare she?!!!!) to the human rights violation that was your mum gently wondering whether you might like to walk the dog – the same dog you’d solemnly vowed, in sparkly pink pen a mere 33 pages earlier, to walk twice a day without fail.

KEEP OUT!

Looking back at what we wrote during our formative years can be both hilarious and painful. Privy to our darkest secrets, our diaries hold confessions of our innermost feelings delivered without fear of retribution or embarrassment. A silent therapist and a sympathetic friend: we can tell them everything.

When writer Rae Earl revisited her battered notebooks to turn them into the bestselling books My Fat, Mad Teenage Diary and My Madder Fatter Diary, she found – among the boys, body worries and bitchiness – a girl whose diary had helped her survive a very tough time. “I was shocked at how poorly I was, really… and that’s where my diary came into its own.” Hers was a confidant when she was concerned about worrying other people. “A diary listens, it doesn’t question you or try to make things better.”

Diaries weren’t always vessels for our personal histories, however, nor are they the preserve of adolescents. The earliest example is a collection of papyrus logbooks cataloguing the transportation of limestone to clad the Great Pyramid of Giza over 4,500 years ago.

Those first diaries let us explore lives that we couldn’t possibly witness otherwise – but nothing beats a rummage in a journal that’s overflowing with feelings. When Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations, he paved the way for confessional diaries. Later, Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book,

“A silent therapist and a sympathetic friend, we tell our diaries everything”

written during her time as lady-in-waiting to the Empress of Japan in the 990s, kick-started the stream-of-consciousness genre known as zuihitsu. In Britain, it was Samuel Pepys who mastered the art of the private diary, with his entertaining eyewitness accounts of the lows (the Great Fire of London and the plague) and the highs ( his new-fangled watch with a built-in alarm) of 17th-century life.

SECRETS AND LIES

Throughout history, the diary has been the definitive source material not only for our own lives, but for major events across the globe. Mary Boykin Chesnut’s diaries detailed the American Civil War; Captain Scott ( pictured right) kept a journal of his ill-fated Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica. Others, like Robert Shields, who chronicled every five minutes of his existence from 1972 to 1997, and Florence Wolfson, whose diary was found in a Manhattan skip, recorded their own intriguing worlds. As cultural artefacts, diaries are unrivalled in their vibrancy and immediacy – but just how reliable are they?

Most people write their diaries without the expectation of publication, though that’s not to say it doesn’t cross their minds. Pepys wrote his in shorthand to thwart snoopers, and some of the juiciest details – his numerous affairs – use a multilingual code for added protection.

However, after his death he left behind a guide to the shorthand he’d used, suggesting he hoped one day someone would want to read them. Anne Frank, upon hearing about the importance of wartime diaries on the radio, promptly rewrote her own. And though both versions survived, The Diary of a Young Girl was later heavily edited.

When someone’s diaries later morph into a memoir, a similarly robust overhaul helps turn them into a page-turner – but since only the very famous or arrogant among us would keep a journal with the sole aim of publishing our life story, we can only hope that a hefty dose of that initial candour lingers.

For the volunteers of the pioneering Mass Observation project, launched in 1937 to document everyday life in Britain, anonymity brought freedom of expression. Author and journalist Simon Garfield scoured the archives to tell the extraordinary stories of several of those people in his trilogy of interwoven reallife diaries: Our Hidden Lives, We Are At War and Private Battles. “The Mass Observers wrote in less cynical times,” he explains. “They were incredibly supportive of the aims – to gather their honest thoughts about their lives and the world around them... I think they forgot for whom they were writing and just wrote for themselves.”

MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS

Real or invented, embellished or true-to-life, the diary is a compelling format for readers. From Bridget Jones’s now quarter of a century’s worth of popularity to Virginia Woolf, diaries offer intimacy, suspense, and the unshakeable sense that we shouldn’t really be reading them at all.

Ultimately, however, a diary lets us witness who people really are. “We’re not meant to see people’s terrible sides,” says Rae. “I like seeing all shades of a person, and diaries give us a glimpse into authentic human beings.”

For Simon, it’s the minutiae of daily life that make diaries so alluring. “What people said in the fish queue, the particulars of a local bus journey. The things diarists regarded as almost valueless – their minor observations and frustrations – turn out to be the things that interest us most.” »

Nowadays, we record so much of our lives online that keeping a diary might seem pointless. From baking triumphs to the death of a loved one, social media lets us pour out our emotions, share achievements, and seek validation. Like Samuel Pepys and Anne Frank before us, we often edit ourselves – it’s just that now our coded language might be a funny GIF to brush off a hurtful comment, or carefully curated photos that won’t betray the chaos of the rest of our world.

As reminders of where we were and what we were doing, our online updates are invaluable but they’re unlikely to be regarded as completely trustworthy by the historians of the future. “Blogs will be of interest in 50 or 100 years’ time, but they’re written with a certain knowing style,” says Simon. “They are always ‘look at me, I think this.’ Writing anonymously, the Mass Observers lost that sense of self-regard. Tweets and Insta posts can’t provide a comparable sense of depth.”

Rae agrees: “As soon as we suspect we have an audience, we change. We’re different in front of others... When you know only you’re going to see it, you’re free to be the worst part of yourself.”

In 2013, a survey revealed that 83% of teenage girls kept a paper diary, despite having the digital universe at their fingertips. So dust off those notebooks, sharpen your pencils, and let your most passionate emotions – and your most mundane observations – flood the page.

“Online updates are invaluable but they’re unlikely to be completely trustworthy”