The idea being, I suppose, that those who catalogue their lives exhaustively stop existing when they stop documenting the self amidst the clutter of other voices and events. Ted Hughes wrote that this was a sign of a spiritual death, she was dead before she killed herself, as her notebooks dissolved into notes.

Plath’s notebooks in the end, all notes, ideas, works, sketches. Heart attack in Hollywood, tended to by his mistress.

Both women who previously needed to rely on the objectivity of the critic The notes at the end of The Last Tycoon. Elizabeth Hardwick was inspired especially by Speedboat for her Sleepless Nights – both scrapbooks that are kaleidoscopic, anecdotal, self-aware, witty, and intensely nostalgic. Also: Joan Didion’s The White Album, Renata Adler’s mosaic Speedboat. The comments on Frances Farmer Is My Sisterand allied blogs that have built sometimes to this glorious other text, this communion, this conversation, this casual liquidness, the superlative nature, that is generative and affirming as opposed to dismissive, that uses our own language instead of theirs.Īnd when I think about so much of the writing happening online, I think about the notebook form, and especially what Hardwick performs in Sleepless Nights, the drifting anecodotes mixing real-life characters with literary references, this tapestry. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order – pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature. Heroines I am beginning to realise that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression.

Heroines zambreno