A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries

by Thomas Mallon

Strangely enough, this exploration of one of the most private of writing endeavors is likely to send readers off in a zillion different directions. Thomas Mallon's survey of diarists throughout the ages introduces us to the most personal writings of more than 100 diarists, including Samuel Pepys, Leonardo da Vinci, Virginia Woolf, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Mallon divides the diarists into seven categories--chroniclers, travelers, pilgrims, creators, apologists, confessors, and prisoners--that he uses as a basis for his inquiries into the nature of these apparently private writings. (From the start Mallon admits that "I still don't believe that one can write to oneself for many words more than get used in a note tacked to the refrigerator saying 'Buy bread.' ") Glimpsing the many, vastly different lives that have been thrown together on these pages is fascinating in and of itself, but Mallon's thoughts about the whys and wherefores of diary-keeping are what make his dense prose so worth reading.

Genres: Nonfiction, Writing, Books About Books, Diary, Biography, History, Journaling

293 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Thomas Mallon is an American novelist, essayist, and critic. His novels are renowned for their attention to historical detail and context and for the author's crisp wit and interest in the "bystanders" to larger historical events. He is the author of ten books of fiction, including Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, Aurora 7, Bandbox, Fellow Travelers (recently adapted into a miniseries by the same name), Watergate, Finale, Landfall, and most recently Up With the Sun. He has also published nonfiction on plagiarism (Stolen Words), diaries (A Book of One's Own), letters (Yours Ever) and the John F. Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine's Garage), as well as two volumes of essays (Rockets and Rodeos and In Fact).
He is a former literary editor of Gentleman's Quarterly, where he wrote the "Doubting Thomas" column in the 1990s, and has contributed frequently to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, and other periodicals. He was appointed a member of the National Council on the Humanities in 2002 and served as Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2005 to 2006.
His honors include Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the National Book Critics Circle citation for reviewing, and the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for distinguished prose style. He was elected as a new member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightful survey and appreciation of the ignoble art of diary writing, which bleeds into the more pompous journal keeping, and is written entirely and solely for the eyes of the diarist, except that it usually isn’t. They usually fancy that someone will come along and read this stuff years later and weep or realise you were a genius or both. The refuse incinerators of the world must have consumed a vast number of confessional diaries that nobody gave a monkey’s about.

Thomas Mallon scampers throughout all of literature to bring you a few pages each on many great names like Simone de Beauvoir, Byron, Degas, Anais Nin, Lewis Carroll, Allen Ginsberg, Joe Orton etc and a swathe of assassins like Arthur Bremer and Lee Harvey Oswald, sex maniacs like “Walter” and prisoners like Albert Speer. All of human life is here. Well, quite a lot.

ASSASSINS

The American ones just can’t spell. Here’s Oswald writing about his application to stay in the USSR being turned down.

I am shocked! I have waited for 2 year to be accepred. My fonde dreams are shattered because of a petty offial. I decide to end it. Soak rist in cold water to numb the pain. Than slash my leftwrist. Than plaug wrist into bathtum of hot water. Somewhere a violin plays, as I wacth my life whirl away.

Fast forward to 1972 and 21 year old loner Arthur Bremer is frustrated, he can’t get close enough to Richard Nixon to shoot him. So reluctantly he picks someone easier to shoot – George Wallace. Here he is looking ahead and feeling pretty aggravated:

I won’t even rate a TV enteroption in Russia or Europe when the news breaks – they never heard of Wallace. If something big in Nam flares up I’ll end up at the bottom of the first page in America. The editors will say “Wallace dead? Who cares.”

“But he shoots him anyway” says Thomas Mallon laconically.




NAMEDROPPERS

On April 8, 1862, the Goncourts note with a mixture of contempt and admiration that Victor Hugo “always has a note-book in his pocket and that if, in conversation with you, he happens to express the tiniest thought, to put forward the smallest idea, he promptly turns away from you, takes out his note-book and writes down what he has just said."

That’s a good example of some heavy namedropping there – yeah, as I was saying to Victor Hugo just yesterday – but that’s the way some of these folks roll. You should check out George Sand (aka Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil). She loves Alfred de Musset but she just can’t get no satisfaction, so as Thomas Mallon says

She gets advice from Liszt, Sainte-Beauve and Delacroix

Two years later she met Chopin and then everything was fine. But what a string of names there. It reminded me of reading Claire Bloom’s autobiography. Her first four romantic entanglements were 1. Richard Burton 2. Laurence Olivier 3. Yul Brynner 4. Rod Steiger

GO ASK BEATRICE SPARKS

Thomas drops a clanger on page 230 when he accepts without question that the well known book Go Ask Alice, published anonymously in 1971, was indeed the diary of a 15 year old girl who had died of a drug overdose. I never read this but just reading the short extract on p232 I thought – surely no 15 year old girl would write like this. Way too assured and stylish. Wiki explains that the person identified as the “editor”, Beatrice Sparks, was suspected fairly quickly of having written either most or all of it. GR now lists it as being entirely by her. And wiki describes her as a "serial hoaxer".


But still, this book gives you a fast & furious tour of so many wildly different lives & situations from the 15th century onward – from the deeply melancholic to the luridly porny to the horribly obsessive to the silly to the profound, it’s the whirligig of life.

[Yaaresse · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are three major problems with this book.
1. It's impossible to read without then wanting to read many of the books (diaries) quoted or referenced. My GR to-read list is already out of control.
2. Because it's not available as an e-book (shakes fist), it took me for-flipping ever to finish it. Then again, because it is not on e-book, I was able to show some restraint about problem #1.
3. It's really making me want to go back to journaling with real pen and paper. This is a problem because I can't even read my own handwriting when I make out a grocery list.

All that's required to keep a diary are basic literacy, a way to record it, and belief (delusion?) that one has either a life or an opinion worth documenting. Mallon takes the reader through history, introduces journalists famous and obscure, then peeks into their diaries--and through those into their personalities and circumstances. His comments about the writers and their motives often assumes more than it reasonably can prove, but his speculations are interesting and entertaining.

To be clear, this is a history book. It is thoughtful analysis, wry commentary, sometimes obscure examples...and a bibliography that will make one's wallet cry: it is not a coaching session with writing prompts or affirmations or creating writing rituals or how to "express yourself" with glitter and colored pens to bring out your inner child, yadda, yadda, yadda. On the other hand, don't be surprised if you suddenly have a ritual of reading a few pages over a cup of coffee in the morning or find yourself motivated to pick up a pen.

[Stacie Nishimoto · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I was, I was - I am."

A fun read indeed! Conversational, witty, erudite, as interested in the diaries of famous poets as those of their overshadowed spouses and siblings. Mallon slips through the pages of chroniclers, travelers, pilgrims, creators, confessors, prisoners, and apologists with ease, contributing empathetic, critical, and humorous commentary. At the very least, peruse the introduction!

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." -J.M.Barrie

[Josh Booth · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a fairly decent read. It gave a fair overview of the various diaries that people have written. Some have been published. I have rarely explored the diary genre. My biggest issue was that it read almost like a textbook at times and was therefore fairly dry. I skimmed a bit. I also found the author to be fairly opinionated with a few of the diarists. His commentaries were a bit too extensive for my liking.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed this book!

[Jenna Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was SUCH an enjoyable read. I find diaries so fascinating and Mallon did an incredible job putting together this work. I hoped that reading this would inspire me to pick up my own journal again, but time will tell. In the meantime I have a long list of published diaries I want to sink my teeth into.

[Mimi]

I don't know if this text is good or even worth reading because I didn't get that far. It was boring and it bored me. It reminded me why I don't read biographies or autobiographies and, by extension, diaries.

[Jennifer Williams · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love reading books with excerpts of journals or diaries. I was excited to read this book but in the end it sort of disappointed me. A lot of people and their diaries are covered but it seemed like the author liked to throw his opinion in too often and that really effects my enjoyment of a book. There wasn't much depth. I recommend Alexandra Johnson's, Leaving a Trace or The Hidden Writer instead if you are wanting to read about people and their diaries.

[Shaun Deane · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the outset, I felt as though I had really hit on something inspirational and there were definitely "pull quotes" I captured. The middle part - especially the chapter called "Apologists" felt strained and overly academic. Could be be and a lack of receptivity. I also found that when the author drifted back in time that I was less interested than vignettes from the 1800s forward. Not sure why.

[Edmund Roughpuppy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A long meeting of Diarists Anonymous
On the subject of diaries, each of us either does or doesn’t. Temporary diarists are rare; if the urge is strong enough to act on, we tend to continue. I think most people interested in this book are diary addicts like me.

Thomas Mallon serves up a crippling buffet of diarists; this is the main strength of the book. The author was just 33 years old when it was published. How on earth did he read all these diaries? The bibliography goes on for 8.5 pages!

He says every diarist wants to be read, admittedly or not. Guilty as charged. I hate it when anything goes to waste. I lived this weird little life, produced dizzy thoughts every day, and I do want to pass them on, just in case they could be of use to someone else.

There are other uses for the diary, however. Some of us use them to understand life. Many patterns are not recognizable up close, but the distance of time clarifies them. Reading my diary gives my life a chance to reveal its theme, something invisible in the day-to-day. This idea was expressed beautifully by the artist Eugene Delacroix (quote not included in Mallon’s book):

“Wednesday, 7 April 1824
I have hurriedly re-read the whole of my Journal. I regret the gaps. I feel as though I were still master of the days I have recorded, even though they are past, whereas those not mentioned in these pages are as though they had never been. . . .
Even one task fulfilled at regular intervals in a man’s life can bring order to his life as a whole; everything else hinges upon it. By keeping a record of my experiences I live my life twice over. The past returns to me. The future is always with me.”

To addicts like me, Mallon’s principal service is to add many published diaries to my reading list, and for that I’m grateful. Unfortunately, he commits the same sin I accused author Joanna L. Stratton of, in my review of her book, “Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier.” He comments too much on his authors. I wish he had given them more space to explain themselves, rather than constantly cutting in with commentary. Curiously, Mallon published excerpts from his own diaries in The New Yorker, many years later. He grants his own writing much more room in this regard; perhaps he thinks it can walk on its own. Well, he points out that, “For all our curiosity, no one else’s secrets ever turn out to be quite as interesting as our own.”

Finally, the book lacks a strong organizational structure. Mallon plucks some ill-defined catagories for chapter titles, then throws authors and diary pages into them at random, going backward and forward in time, only occasionally relating a diary to any other. He honestly characterises this process: “ . . . books as ruminatingly undisciplined as mine.”

Undisciplined though it is, the book is a treasure chest of exquisite quotes. I leave you with two from my favorite diarist covered here.

“All day [my diaries] make a perfect uproar in their solitary confinement — although no one hears it. And at night they become phosphorescent, though nobody sees it.”

“The truth is I think I am in love with her: but I am also mightily in love with myself. One or the other has to give.” — Bruce Frederick Cummings, also known as Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lucky find at a used book store brought me this fantastic and thoughtfully edited collection of diaries and the people who kept them. An absolute joy to read, if not in one sitting. I took it in through little bites over months. Mallon organizes his content thematically and with great care.

Notes

When human beings are playing for stakes of happiness and self-knowledge, the only believable victories are probably the temporary and partial ones.

It was perhaps Anais Nin’s preference for total fulfillment to partial victories that made her in the 1970s a more likely cult figure… Miss Nin could assure thousands of diarists eager to reach her extremes of creativity and awareness that her life had always been “very full and very rich.” (pg. 84)

But it is hardly a chronicle of the times, for Miss Nin feels one can become too absorbed in an event like D-Day. Her friend Gonzolo, “who lives glued to the radio,” certainly is, and it is doing him no good at all: “Because he only has one life, the one he shares with the present, in history, because he is not creating an antidote to the poisons of history, Gonzolo has no hope. He is crushed by events. He has no inner life to sustain and alchemize events.”

“too much lucidity creates a desert”

(pg. 85)

____

Still, this is no easy death for Aram Saroyan to anticipate; he is sensibly frightened of the change about to take place in his “own interior architecture: as if a huge wall were to be suddenly removed and sunlight to flood in where for years what has grown has been an issue of darkness.” (pg. 94)

____

Lewis is troubled by the realization that he is building an imaginary Joy in his mind, that his memory no longer matches life; he is even losing a sense of what she looked like. It's easier for him to remember the face of the casual acquaintance; when a man thinks on the face of his beloved he realizes he is seen it from too many angles, and in too many moods, to have it flash, like a single slide, when he summons it. (pg. 98)

____

It is only when she reaches eighty-two, in 1965, that she begins in notebook… in it she experiences the pleasures of generalizing, being definite, assertive. (pg. 104)

____

Has anything really been concluded? Perhaps we have a demonstration of journal keeping's auto suggestiveness, it's ability to soothe, like driving or plate-breaking, if it is done quickly and assiduously enough during crisis. (pg. 112)

____

Dag Hammarskjöld seems to have been alone nearly all his life. The sense of solitary misery given off by Markings is at times overwhelming. He tries to tell himself that “loneliness can be a communion,” but on the same page he must admit: “We reach out towards the other. In vain—because we have never dared to give ourselves.” (pg. 119)

____

Fitzgerald succeeded for a time, Malcolm Cowley once said, partly from a “double personality” got him approach the world he wrote about as both participant and observer. It is the same sort of vision Albert Camus describes in his notebooks: “I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched.” (pg. 143)

____

Lest we extend that test to their authors preliminary musings, perhaps we should remind ourselves of what Henry James wrote in The Art of Fiction: “we must grant the artist to subject, his idea, his donnée: art criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.” (pg. 147)

____

The further one ventures into the Degas’s notebooks the more one senses a shyness, a scrupulousness, that makes moments of revelation, when they do come, all the more compelling. He does not want the glamorous fame that is sustained by ignorance: “there is a sort of shame in being known especially by people who don't understand you,” he writes. (pg.148)

____

These have been extraordinary cases, people for whom love was or became all. If we recognize their passions, we may still be rather daunted by the scale on which they felt them. With most of us is not often like that. Love, perhaps to our regret, is one of the things we are likely to experience in moderation… Human continence and wariness are actually more remarkable than human wantonness. For most men and women love will be in the course of things, a part of the whole, and their diaries, like their lives, will fall into another chapter of a book such as this. (pg. 204)

____

By unburdening one's soul on paper, one could have one's sins and remember them, too. Confession was still good for the soul, but now it could be a positive delight to the eyes as well… his book may have the Puritan’s tortured sincerity, or it may be worthy of La Rochefoucauld’s skeptical observations that we “confessed to the little faults only to persuade ourselves that we have no great ones.” (pg. 209)

____

How could anyone of such apparent sensitivity and scruple have remained for so many years at the side of barbarians? It is a genuine conundrum. Spear finally illustrates not evil’s banality, but it’s centrality, its endless presence in people… 20 years after the fall of Berlin on July 9, 1965, he wrote in his diary that he felt “strangely stirred up by the idea that the most successful architectural creation of my life is a chimera, an immaterial phenomenon.” (pg. 263)
____

Allingham seems to have suffered, for much of his adult life, from the certainty that he was the least sought-after person in the room. (pg. 264)

____

“I think anxieties about ways and means have robbed me of thrills that I ought to have had. I wonder if it was my fault? Life is to me at times very frightening. I have always the feeling of living in a world that belongs to other people must be placated or dodged. But surely living should be wonderful sometimes in spite of pain?”

What the diarists of the first chapter have in common with those in this last one is voluminousness. But the chroniclers needed so much space because of their avidity and lack of suspicion toward life made them happy to rank and bag all of its details; the prisoners of one sort or another, like Eve Wilson, require room enough in which to hide from the world, alternative planets onto which they can step when bad luck and odd moods evict them from this one. (pg. 274)

(pg. 274)
____

Alice's room, like John Donne’s body, is a little world made cunningly, and she recognizes that even on her “microscopic field, minute events are perpetually taking place illustrative of the broadest facts of human nature.” (pg. 279)
____

Barbellion never quite reached adulthood, a state attained when one comes to except, or at least intuit, that God, Biology, and our so-called fellow men have no intention of accommodating our dreams. (pg. 291)

[Brook · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF. I read sections from multiple chapters, but didn’t finish any of them.

The original introduction from the 1984 release is beautiful and as a stand-alone essay I would rate it 5 stars.

The book itself is disorganized. Mallon jumps from one diarist to another, often without taking the time to introduce them as much as I would have liked. I would have really enjoyed some subheadings at least, so I could flip through the book and easily find the sections about different people.

The book is essentially a collection of write ups on various historical diarists. Once he moves on to the next person, he doesn’t return to the previous. I don’t understand the purpose of trying to write it all as one cohesive book. The segways from one diarist to another are often abrupt anyways.

Finally, he is very opinionated about certain diarists. Specifically those that are women.

[Jasmin Isabell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me some Time to finish but I still enjoyed it. An interesting book about the history of diaries. It did feel a bit dry sometimes and I had moments where I was annoyed because the author was too opinionated. But I got what I wanted with this book.

[Maya Varde · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book really close to my heart. As a diarist , I love to know what people write in their diaries.

[Katrinka]

I enjoyed this one, but at the same time, there was something about Mallon's tone that made me glad he'll never be discussing any of my writing, diaristic or otherwise.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, Jesus, someone stop him — he's reaching for a pen!

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

What drives a person to keep a diary? Ultimately, a diary is the voicing of a wish for immortality. Mallon researched a vast number of diaries for this book, and divided them into a few major categories (the chronicler, the traveler, the artist, the confessional).

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book. Well-written. All about the different types of diarists and dairy purposes, including chronicling, traveling, apologizing, and creating, to name a few. He weaves together each chapter with samples and narratives about famous and not-so famous diaries. For example, Anne Frank is discussed at length at the end of the book. I learned a lot from this book, and seeing that I myself am primarily a diarist, it was good reading. I consider myself to be the type of diarist that creates an alternate world to the one I'm living in. The more I read my own diary, the more I see myself in all my various moods and forms. I see my obsessions and my habits. For years I kept a diary without ever reading it; surprisingly, a lot of the diarists mentioned in Mallon's book say the same thing. They recorded things but rarely read them. I have made it a mission to reread all of my writings because I feel that true growth can occur only with rereading what one has written. My main goal in keeping diaries is to grow as a person.
Another thing I learned in Mallon's book is the term "commonplace" book. A commonplace book is the type of journal where one records favorite quotes or inspirations, often used in creating one's own art.
The types of diarists and diaries are not mutually exclusive. One person's diary could be a blend of various types in different parts. But Mallon's classification system is useful in letting one think critically about what diaries are and what are their uses.

[Jonna Higgins-Freese]

Thomas Mallon just doesn't speak to my condition. Maybe I subconsciously can't get into him b/c apparently he's a conservative; maybe it's b/c he's conservative that he doesn't speak to my condition. I don't know, but I quit because I was bored silly.

A few things struck me before I quit, from a diary entry on 1/16/1974: "One of those nights when, for a moment, i think: 'A thousand years won't be enough.' A dusting of snow fell today, just enough to freshen the dirty pile on the ground: Nature's cosmetic Once again each filament of bare branch is frosted . . . splendid lattices stretching under the lamps of the Yard and in front of the museum. No, a thousand years would not be enough to watch this" (xii).

Woolf's fundamental motive for keeping a diary is "to hold on to it all, to cheat the clock and death of all the things taht she had lived" (34).

Evelyn Waugh: "Nobody wants to read other people's reflections on life and religion and politics, but the routine of their day, properly recorded, is always interesting" (39).

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've owned this book for decades. I've started to read it, and I've come back to it many times. It was stored and un-stored in box(es) like many of my books I'm re-discovering. I recently found it again and read more.

I intend to finish it. In the meantime, I'm acknowledging the affect - I wasn't directly aware of - it has had on me. I've been writing notes, lists, to-dos, diaries, meandering-of-my-mind or whatever for even more decades. I thought I was weird. Mr. Mallon confirms that if I was, I had a LOT of company.

Thomas Mallon gives credence to remembering, to acknowledging, to recording a life. At one point he describes:
"one thing I learned is that the private fingering of ordinary experience can fill up notebooks as interesting as musings of great events; diary-writing is the poor man's art."

He divides those who do this into categories. I won't ruin it for anyone to detail them, but there are only seven (maybe more??). There is commonality among them. For sure, it includes some great voices. It includes numerous examples and references. It inquires what the past provides the future.

It is non-fiction but refers and chronicles lots and lots of fiction. Be forewarned, it can stimulate the "fingering of ordinary experience". More to follow...

[D'face · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this overview of more than one hundred diaries. Mallon groups the diaries into categories of writers and their circumstances and shows that diaries can serve many purposes. Some record travels, others confinement, some religious development and others creative, some are used to argue a point of view whilst others are used as cofessionals.

If you are interested in books, writing and the creative process this book will be of interest to you. The role of diaries as a historical record at all levels of society is explored. This book inspired me to commence my own diary/journal. I was very interested in the idea of workbooks or commonplace books wherein someone collects their ideas and scraps of information as they work on a project.

I saw a good review of this book on The Writers Almanac and struggled for more than a year to try and find a copy. Eventually I was able to purchase one from overseas. I am glad that I did.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book. Mallon is definitely a bit of a wordy intellectual, and can overanalyze (almost to the point of cruelty) some of the diaries and diarists. He often assumes too much of the reader, dropping names and events for context that don't always come to my little mind. With that said, though, this is a wonderful look inside the different people and different reasons people write in journals and diaries. Mallon has read (at least!) dozens of diaries and there are enough direct quotes from them to satisfy our voyeuristic nature! He also has points of extreme tenderness when it is obvious that Mallon understands what it is to write you heart down on paper. He is quite witty at times, and laughs with us at the ridiculous, and admires the amazing and cradles the vulnerable.

Highly recommend it. There is also a great bibliography of diaries - I'm definitely going to check those out.

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love reading people's journals and diaries. I have kept a journal or a diary my entire life but not faithfully, daily but scattered. I started this book, again, and instantly had the urge to underline. I resisted for a chapter or two and then went back and started reading from the beginning and underlined everything that appealed and also made a list of all the diarists listed so I could check out their books or mark the ones already read in my lifetime. The different types of journals, the reasons why people wrote and how they wrote and what they recorded...the sheer variety of expression. This is an amazing treasure of a book. Upon rereading, I find myself doing exactly the same thing and ending up at Amazon and Abe Books searching out diaries that I haven't read yet. A diary is a map of my planet ...idea of W.H. Auden...love it. And, the woman who wrote...I think I have always wanted alone-ness as a drunkard wants drink. ..read my mind.

[basia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a survey of diaries, divided into types of diary keepers. Among them are those who record the events of their time and their own adventures, those who keep track of ideas, and those who create a world to live in because they cannot live fully in the physical world. Mallon is a charming guide. He has made an effort to supply us with metaphors stretched almost to the point of goofiness.

There is no room in Barbellion's world for anyone but himself, and fortunately, the kind of book he chooses to make his respirator--the diary--needn't have anybody else hooked up to it. (287)

He is also not shy about his disapproval of the self-satisfied. Thoreau gets a good bashing. "There is something magnificent in the way he fails to see how snobbish his own humility can be." (78) But he is generous in his appreciation, and you come away from the book wanting to read many of the diaries he mentions.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mallon is an excellent writer who finds quirky subjects and quirky ways of writing about them. Rockets & Rodeos is a Plutarchian set of pairs, compared and contrasted. He wrote a memoir of his father which is a meditation based centrally on his father's collected canceled checks. He wrote a historical novel surrounding the fate that befell the couple who accompanied the Lincoln's to the theater the night of Lincoln's assassination.

In this book he takes one on a chronological tour of the history of modern diary-keeping, and it's a worthwhile trip. He uses examples of diarists both famous and obscure, including celebrities and everyday folk.

One example of the quirkiness in his subject is that of Kafka's "alarming juxtapositions," such as that in his diary entry of August 1, 1914:

Germany declares war on Russia – Swimming in the afternoon. (p. 146).

Distant thunder indeed!

Though not compelling, it is in fact fascinating to read, and well worth it.

[Adrian]

Mallon's survey of the best published diaries and why they are special. We all enjoy coming across our favourites in books like these. Mine are- Boswell, Sarton, Barbellion, Speer and Mansfield. I've noted some diarists I was unaware of such as Helen Bevington, William Souter, Ellen Weeton and Eve Wilson. This book was written 25 years before Mallon's volume on letter writers and betrays a religious inclination I wasn't aware of reading the later volume. He is also a little quick to judge without cause. He claims Alice James exaggerated her equanimity about approaching death with no evidence to support this idea.

[Ilya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thomas Mallon is a fantastic novelist, whose sentences crackle with humor and irony.

When I found this book at a used bookstore, I wondered whether it was the same Mallon who wrote a non-fiction survey of journals and diaries. It is. And Mallon's same wryness and wit are there just the same.

I keep a journal every day, so there was a lot to interest me in this book. But because it jumps from one diarist to another, the book never grabbed me the way, say, "Fellow Travelers" did. (I am however amazed how many diaries Mallon has read - and clearly read closely).

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mallon artfully introduces and connects the diaries, much like in his more recent book on letters (which I read recently, causing me to reread this book). Unlike the letters book there seems to be more of the obscure and the personal here and even with eyes to a future public the diary allows and encourages more self-reflection and honesty than the immediately public letter. You also do not need a correspondent so it reaches out more directly to the introvert. But enough about me.

[H]

An affirmation for journals and diaries, which fascinate us both as writers and readers. Wonderful introduction. The rest is something of a history of diary-writers and their secret stories, categorized by the function of the diaries. The most interesting was the section on diaries logging the writer's creation of art.

[Madeline · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good for reading before bed and finding out which diaries might be interesting. But don't ask it to do any more than that, I think.

Mallon is mostly a pretty good writer, but there are some snags here that even my not-very-attentive reading couldn't pass over.