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

A wonderful book designed to appeal to all people who keep diaries and all those interested in the diaries of others (usually one and the same, I dare say). The author, Mr. Mallon, is wise, witty, provocative, and entertaining, and admits to being one of us! He has, moreover, a wide acquaintance with almost all the published diaries currently available in libraries, including--but by no means limited to--those of professional writers or of the famous and infamous. After perusing Mallon's excerpts and commentaries, you will know precisely which collections you will want to check out, investigate further, and eventually own. The genre itself is much more extensive than I had known, and Mallon has set me off on some remarkable new reading experiences!

I read this book over thirteen years ago, and I was hooked on diaries ever since. After reading in Mallon's book about some of the most interesting diarists, I found other diaries to read-one about a man's search for an institution for his retarded son, one by a woman facing major surgery and hospitalization (Walking Through the Fire), and a few others. He also inspired me to start my own diary, which I kept for over twelve years, seldom missing a day. This last year or so, I have fallen off but still add to my diary now and then. This is an activity I was hardly aware of, but when diary keeping is presented in such an interesting way, one sees it in a whole new way. I think of it as "the word made flesh." Mr. Mallon's book has added more to my life than practically any other I have ever read.

I finally got around to reading a yellowed Penquin edition of A Book of One's Own and am pleased to see that Hungry Mind is keeping this alive and available for everyone else who has yet to enjoy it. Essentially, it is a pageant of diarists and their words, with Mallon standing to the side, offering an often witty, always insightful commentary. It is a literate, sensitive dialogue. As a sometime diarist, I fought for awhile with his notion that everyone writes with an audience in mind, that our most private writings are not unselfconscious, that we intend to be found out. But I did not go reading this to locate my own opinions. It is delightful, and with the bibliography neatly situated in the back, it reads silkily, without the interruption of footnotes.

Peeking through keyholes of private lives. That's one feeling generated from reading Mallon's analysis of both famous and obscure diarists. Not that the scenes brought to our own mind's vision always ring with truth. Mallon offers fascinating commentary on how the records might reflect deeply seated frustrations, anomosities, or other sources of bias. One real pleasure of this book is its ability to convey, through snippets of diaries, the rich diversity of style which is possible in writing about one's own life and times. Despite some very different approaches, Mallon still manages to keep focused on the unifying theme of why people write in the first place, insisting that all diarists really expect that, sometime (and that may be after death), their words will be read and their voices will matter. Hungry Mind Find Press is to be commended for re-issuing this fascinating little book, filled with some very big ideas about life and the challenge of making sense out o! f it all. Anyone who has ever written in a diary, or has thought about that pursuit, will find this read to be very intriguing indeed.