by prolurker
Type: fiction
Status: I recommend
Author: Thomas Mallon
Tags: life-writing genres
Description: A wonderfully enjoyable ramble through many, many personal diaries. Mallon groups diaries by...
2005-09-23
book
A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries
A wonderfully enjoyable ramble through many, many personal diaries. Mallon groups diaries by their author's main purpose in writing them; people write diaries to justify their actions, to confess their flaws, to chronicle events, to record their creations, and as an escape from a physical or mental prison. Diarists can provide a minutely detailed account of a time period or of a society's transition; they can anatomize their own personality; they can record travels, work, political interactions.
The diarists described in this book range from the well-known (Darwin, Alfred Dreyfus, C.S. Lewis) to the obscure (Elizabethan-era student John Manningham, struggling artist Benjamin Haydon, fawning sycophant George Bubb Dodington, and biologist W.N.P. Barbellion, who Mallon chooses as the author of the greatest diary ever written). Mallon's assessments are always interesting and perceptive, and, when he doesn't like a diarist, cuttingly funny. This book is a keeper; you could use it to assemble a lifetime's worth of diaries to read.
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