The One Thing You Need to Write Memorable Memoir — Perspective
The difference between journaling and craft
Growing up, I read the journals of famous writers. Often their letters, too. It felt naughty, illicit, here I was peering into the secret lives of dead strangers. From Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf to Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, it was thrilling to know the people behind the prose, but also to gain insight in how they used journaling and letter-writing as an experimental space, a training ground for what would become their short stories, essays, and novels.
Journaling and letter-writing are an important part of a writer’s journey, but they aren’t the destination.
Plath is famed for her confessional poetry, which was avant-garde for the time, joining the likes of Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, all of whom wrote boldly about mental illness. In “Wanting to Die” Sexton writes:
But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.
