Dear diaries

I am a compulsive diarist and have been since I was 16. My daughter fantasises that even as a mad old lady in the attic I will still be tapping out my diary. I have to do it. If I don’t, I feel almost ill, as if I am only half living. Do I want my diaries published? Yes, I do, though I did not write them for that purpose. I am 66 and, due to the sheer number of words, they would fill 20 volumes. I feel that if they are not read, my life as a writer will have been wasted.

The diarists with whom I most empathise were also compulsive, though I admire those who deliberately chronicle an important period of history. Victor Klemperer, a professor of languages who was the son of a rabbi but had an Aryan wife and remained in Dresden throughout the war, wrote I Shall Bear Witness, a diary that records the daily restrictions and persecution suffered by Jews. The young Anne Frank knew the value of what she was documenting about her Jewish family while in hiding in Amsterdam, but her diary was also her secret friend. She called it ‘Kitty’.

Compulsive diarists are ambivalent: we want to be private but we want our thoughts to be appreciated. When Jean Lucey Pratt, some of whose diaries have been published as A Notable Woman, began her first in 1926, aged 16, she wrote: ‘This document is private.’ But as her life unfolded and she realised that her career as an author was not going to take off, she started to treat her diaries more seriously. On Christmas Day 1934, she wrote: ‘7 p.m. A diarist must do what other writers may not… His purpose is special and peculiar.