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Prototype Diary of an Ending.
In Diary of an Ending, internationally renowned photographer Lina Scheynius expands her artistic vision to prose, offering an unflinching and intimate exploration of heartbreak and self-recovery.
Blurring the boundaries between diary and essay, Diary of an Ending explores the break-up of a relationship, combining extracts from Scheynius’s diary – written in Swedish and translated by Saskia Vogel – with reflective essays written in English five years on, exploring ideas about art and photography, sex and passion, the act of diary-making, destructive relationships, motherhood and home.
Interspersed with black-and-white photographs, and written with the same unashamed and unfiltered honesty that defines Scheynius’s photography, Diary of an Ending is an intimate hybrid of memoir and autofiction, a meditation on the passage of time and the transformative power of creativity.
Blurring the boundaries between diary and essay, Diary of an Ending explores the break-up of a relationship, combining extracts from Scheynius’s diary – written in Swedish and translated by Saskia Vogel – with reflective essays written in English five years on, exploring ideas about art and photography, sex and passion, the act of diary-making, destructive relationships, motherhood and home.
Interspersed with black-and-white photographs, and written with the same unashamed and unfiltered honesty that defines Scheynius’s photography, Diary of an Ending is an intimate hybrid of memoir and autofiction, a meditation on the passage of time and the transformative power of creativity.
- GenresMemoir
256 pages, Paperback
Published July 9, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 7, 2026
A gut-wrenching snapshot into heartbreak and what it can do to the soul. I thank Lina for allowing us readers in to such a vulnerable piece of her life.
May 26, 2026
Lina Scheynius’s "A Diary of an Ending" is an uneven but compelling experiment in autobiographical form. Built through a combination of contemporaneous diary entries and retrospective commentary written for publication, the book attempts to stage the tension between lived experience and later interpretation. At its best, it succeeds precisely because it acknowledges the instability of both.
The diary entries themselves engage with some of the central problems of diaristic writing: incompleteness, lack of perspective, narcissism, banality, and the embarrassment of rereading oneself. Scheynius is acutely aware of this “cringe” dimension of the diary archive, and to her credit she does not try to disguise it. In fact, many of the entries are banal or repetitive in exactly the way real diaries often are — not because they are poorly conceived, but because immediacy rarely produces literary coherence. Anyone who has revisited their own journals, or those of even celebrated writers, will recognise the same uncomfortable mixture of self-exposure and self-mythologising.
What ultimately makes these sections work is their candour. The vulnerability feels genuine rather than performed, and the oscillation between collapse and recovery emerges with emotional clarity. In this sense, the text operates similarly to Scheynius’s photography: suspended between exposure and control, disempowerment and self-reclamation. The self is continuously destabilised and reassembled through narration.
The weaker sections are the retrospective mini-essays interspersed throughout the book. Here, Scheynius attempts to intellectualise and frame the material from a detached perspective, but the effect is often flat and overdetermined. Rather than allowing meaning to emerge organically from the fragments, she explains too much, insists too heavily on interpretation, and ends up diluting the force of the diary entries themselves. The commentary frequently lapses into the language of therapeutic self-help — empowerment articulated through familiar formulas rather than genuinely incisive reflection.
The inclusion of photographs also feels underdeveloped. As someone working on intermediality and life writing, I was particularly interested in how image and text might interact here, but the photographs rarely complicate or deepen the narrative. They remain largely illustrative, insufficiently contextualised, and somewhat disconnected from the book’s broader formal ambitions. Their presence often seems justified primarily by the fact that Scheynius is a photographer, rather than by any necessary dialogue between visual and textual forms.
What makes the book frustrating is that its ambitions are genuinely interesting. One can clearly see the attempt to create something formally and emotionally sophisticated out of the fragments of intimacy, memory, and self-documentation. But the execution remains inconsistent. The strongest parts are those that trust fragmentation, vulnerability, and incompleteness; the weakest are those that try too hard to explain what the reader has already understood.
Three stars feels fair: not unsuccessful, but ultimately more interesting in intention than in result.
The diary entries themselves engage with some of the central problems of diaristic writing: incompleteness, lack of perspective, narcissism, banality, and the embarrassment of rereading oneself. Scheynius is acutely aware of this “cringe” dimension of the diary archive, and to her credit she does not try to disguise it. In fact, many of the entries are banal or repetitive in exactly the way real diaries often are — not because they are poorly conceived, but because immediacy rarely produces literary coherence. Anyone who has revisited their own journals, or those of even celebrated writers, will recognise the same uncomfortable mixture of self-exposure and self-mythologising.
What ultimately makes these sections work is their candour. The vulnerability feels genuine rather than performed, and the oscillation between collapse and recovery emerges with emotional clarity. In this sense, the text operates similarly to Scheynius’s photography: suspended between exposure and control, disempowerment and self-reclamation. The self is continuously destabilised and reassembled through narration.
The weaker sections are the retrospective mini-essays interspersed throughout the book. Here, Scheynius attempts to intellectualise and frame the material from a detached perspective, but the effect is often flat and overdetermined. Rather than allowing meaning to emerge organically from the fragments, she explains too much, insists too heavily on interpretation, and ends up diluting the force of the diary entries themselves. The commentary frequently lapses into the language of therapeutic self-help — empowerment articulated through familiar formulas rather than genuinely incisive reflection.
The inclusion of photographs also feels underdeveloped. As someone working on intermediality and life writing, I was particularly interested in how image and text might interact here, but the photographs rarely complicate or deepen the narrative. They remain largely illustrative, insufficiently contextualised, and somewhat disconnected from the book’s broader formal ambitions. Their presence often seems justified primarily by the fact that Scheynius is a photographer, rather than by any necessary dialogue between visual and textual forms.
What makes the book frustrating is that its ambitions are genuinely interesting. One can clearly see the attempt to create something formally and emotionally sophisticated out of the fragments of intimacy, memory, and self-documentation. But the execution remains inconsistent. The strongest parts are those that trust fragmentation, vulnerability, and incompleteness; the weakest are those that try too hard to explain what the reader has already understood.
Three stars feels fair: not unsuccessful, but ultimately more interesting in intention than in result.
February 9, 2026
I kept coming back to this book in the same way that Lina keeps returning to A. Why do I love it? Why can’t I break free of it?
Diary of an Ending by Lina Scheynius and translated by Saskia Vogel is exactly what the title promises. Written in the months after her relationship with A ends, Lina lays her longing, anger, love, and the maddening push and pull of a toxic ex you can’t resist, bare.
Her entries are intimate, messy, sometimes hopeful, and her heartbreak is universal. We’ve all been her (and regrettably, A) at some point in our lives. Because Scheynius is a photographer, I did hope there would be more photos. The portraits were my favorites of those included.
Other than that, it was a good read and I couldn’t put it down.
Diary of an Ending by Lina Scheynius and translated by Saskia Vogel is exactly what the title promises. Written in the months after her relationship with A ends, Lina lays her longing, anger, love, and the maddening push and pull of a toxic ex you can’t resist, bare.
Her entries are intimate, messy, sometimes hopeful, and her heartbreak is universal. We’ve all been her (and regrettably, A) at some point in our lives. Because Scheynius is a photographer, I did hope there would be more photos. The portraits were my favorites of those included.
Other than that, it was a good read and I couldn’t put it down.
April 11, 2026
I found this book so disorientating just like how it is to say goodbye to someone. The obsession, confusion, unreliability and also significance of your memory and the replaying of hurt and good moments. Also really appreciated the honest reflection chapters where she is able to look at her grief more objectively and share thoughts and context to show how we are still living and life is always moving when we feel like we’re in the thick of it.
January 26, 2026
„how we love is complicated, how we lose is complicated, too.(…) regardless of how much I learn, I can never get away from the fact that every love is going to be a loss. To love anyway, that is the challenge.”
Honestly I was drawn to this book in a bookshop in a weird way and just bought it without looking it up or peeking inside and it was really meant for me to be read in this particular time of my life. I loved it and it calmed me down in a very specific way that I can’t even understand myself
Honestly I was drawn to this book in a bookshop in a weird way and just bought it without looking it up or peeking inside and it was really meant for me to be read in this particular time of my life. I loved it and it calmed me down in a very specific way that I can’t even understand myself
October 26, 2025
3.5 stars
November 14, 2025
Quote self indulgent :(
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February 6, 2026scho im oktober gläsä
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews