archaeology of a trunk of notebooks

“I was never so young that I didn’t hear that terrible, all-knowing voice in my head, narrating my life” — Joyce Maynard, At Home in the World, 167

today i stayed home to write, work on the chapbook, and (told myself i would) go through all the stuff i brought back from my mom’s house last week.

every notebook that i wrote, starting with the fill-in-the-blank “girl’s life” diary beginning with the first day of sixth grade, which catalogs “things i am good at” and “things i am bad at” and who has nice hair and who i want to be friends with and whose mannerisms make me feel embarrassed for them. 

a theme that comes up repeatedly, i feel like, in books about girls, writing, is the idea that the diary is not private, that it must be encoded. where was it, i read in a book, i think it was a memoir, about the girl writing about every tv show her family watched, in perfect handwriting, instead of writing about whatever terrible thing was actually happening. in fun home, i think it is, how alison bechtel has a secret symbol for “masturbation” in her diary. the obsessive documentation yet what is left out. i want to think about this more, what we conceal/perform in ostensibly private spaces. 

sexy/fantasy novels that i wrote in middle school, with my toxic beast friend, passing the college-rule notebooks back and forth after school. we had a rich fantasy life, we were the characters, transformed the suburban landscape into forests and wastelands, running through the  unfinished houses that went up, rapidly, in her upwardly mobile neighborhood. we stood on the top of a mound of fill-dirt, in what used to be a florida scrub forest, and solemnly told each other we were in love (IRL) with our respective character’s love interests (a knight name Cyril and prince named Briar, respectively; we’d already chosen the young hollywood stars who would play them in the movie (Paul Walker and Freddie Prinze Jr, respectively) i could write a whole MA thesis about this, fictionalized nostalgia for the magical past, the appropriation of pop culture by pre-teen girls, the transformation of the suburban landscape and the psychoanalytic ramifications of, at 12, inventing your perfect man in a story in order to fall in love with him, the great thrill of writing kissing scenes, having never been kissed IRL, writing around the idea of sex, the door shutting to the royal bedchamber in the epilogue, the joint wedding, the kingdom returned to its natural order. 

there’s a scrapbook somewhere, maybe i’ll post pictures. 

then, the huge sketchbooks i favored in high school, and the beginning of the theory of secret longing. 

march 23, 2002: at the drama club car wash ***** accidentally squirted me with the reclaimed city water. when i jumped she said “oh, sorry, babe.” i might have a crush on *****. i might be bisexual. [emphasis in original]

april 2, 2002:  i think i really really need psychoanalysis. grace thinks all people our age do, but me in particular. 

april 16, 2002: [going to county-wide Young Authors conference] i hope i don’t embarrass myself in front of sam. he’s friends with everyone in drama; then i will feel really stupid. [later, same day] i was misinterpreted. i knew i would be. Denny Bowden [superintendent of the school district? i don’t remember], i suppose it was, said my poem “exemplified the american spirit” or “expressed emotions from september 11” and put it with all the “my poor country” and “my brave father going off to war” poems. i couldn’t help feeling like he didn’t get what it was about— feeling lonely or different, not being believed, confusion, and how writing is a quest to figure that out. when i got back to school the scary evangelist told me i looked “cute.” mrs. ward told my parents lots of wonderful things about me.

i feel so embarrassed right now. (but not so embarrassed that i’m not blogging about it, obvs)