Dear Joan Didion,

I just read your On Keeping a Notebook essay and felt compelled to write a response. I keep a notebook. But I guess you’d call it more of a diary. It truly is a diary, but I love reading your notes from your notebook. I too write to remember. And I know where it comes from. My mother passed away when I was 18. I remember at the time, I received some of her old journals and notebooks and it felt like such a magical gateway into her as a person after she had passed. I also remember wishing I had been keeping a journal during that time so that I could remember what life was like. What was I thinking at the time? What was really happening to my mother? How was she feeling? She passed away of cancer, which she had battled for many years. Even now, after more than 20 years without her, I have little fragments of memories from that time. Especially the last year of her life where things felt so incredibly tumultuous. But are those memories real? Or are they, heightened, exaggerated? I guess in a way, they’re real to me. It must be how I experienced those moments even if they’re not truly factual.

I’m curious to try more of your style of keeping a notebook. Right now I journal in the morning, before I start my day. It’s mostly a brain dump so that I can start my day without a bunch of shit in my head. Inspired by the work of Julia Cameron’s the Artist’s Way. But lately, I’m noticing that while it used to be very effective for me, I’m getting bored of it. And I’m getting bored of reading the same things from 5 years ago still today. Yes, I’m tired. And yes, I was apparently tired 5 years ago. But wouldn’t it have been nicer to have had more “language” around what that tired was. I feel your way of keeping a notebook is very, for lack of better words, flowery. It really paints a scene and a feeling. Mine, is fact. Tired. Fact. But what is the difference between tired five years ago and today. Because five years ago, I didn’t have a four year old son. So I know for a fact, that the tired from then is different from the tired from now. I guess I have already started to lose touch with me from five years ago. So I’m going to try and keep a notebook more in your style. Which also feels more freeing. It means I don’t need to sit down for 20 or so minutes to fill up X amount of pages of the Morning Pages routine. It means I write to remember, to keep in touch with what it actually felt like. Not just a list of “facts.”

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to read any of your work, and especially this specific essay. I would like to think that things come to us when we are ready for them, and maybe I just wasn’t quite ready for your words at the time.