The Journey of my Journals

As a kid, I was always a natural diary-keeper. Someone, I think my oldest sister, bought me a red diary with a lock when I was eight and I proceeded to record events of my fascinating life. Anyone who's read my book knows what this entailed: my daily crush reports on Larry Aronson. Right before our move to Arizona I got a little more sophisticated and got a paisley journal with no lock (a big reading risk in a house with seven snoopy sisters), and then, as a teen, I used gigantic spiral notebooks. Great material for writing book two, right? After all, original source material! Historical fact! A reference! The historian in me loves this. Why even write? Why not just transcribe?

Well, it turns out that diaries don't make a book. I opened my diaries looking for things that I forgot in the numerous stories I've already written of our first five years in Arizona and what did I find? As the mother of a teen and a tween, I should have known the answer to this. Anyone should. I found a bunch of whining blather. I found a lot of teen anguish and misery and unrequited crushes and false reporting going on between my alleged friends and the guys involved. Also, when I start taking French my Junior year I, annoyingly, start writing a lot of the entries in French.

Is this a book? No. Will this even help me write a book? No.

Turns out the parts I remember and the themes I remember are the most interesting parts anyway. The miserable crushes that end in a rolling make out session on top of a cactus in the desert; the way my life parallels my mother's in a carnival mirror kind of way; the way that the seven of us descend upon Scottsdale like some sort of bomb. That's not in my diaries. That's something you need time to see. A diary's about a day's events. A book is like a panorama.

What is left is exactly what I started off with and what I was writing anyway: a book about a Jewish girl from Skokie showing up in the Horse-riding Cowboy Scottsdale of 1973, not exactly a time traveller but, in many ways, a creature from another place and time.

Has anyone else saved their diaries or journals from high school and found them less than intriguing?  Do you find that your memories are a more accurate reporter of fact than the teenage you?

Linda
Author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie
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I've been unable to log my own comments in on Blogger for months! So please excuse me if you put a comment here and it goes without a response. Please know that I'm reading and would like to comment but am having technical difficulties with the site.

Looking Up, Letting Go

There's a lot I've discovered the last four months since my book was published. Really, enough to fill up many, many blogs posts, which I'm determined to write. But here's my topic for today: people buy books and don't read them. Even I do this.

There's, of course, the absolute wonder and amazing fact of people buying a book you've written at all. That I want to express gratitude for. To labor and struggle, buried like a hermit in my office year after year, agonizing over the structure, the stories, the right balance of humor and tragedy, and then to press that awful "publish" button and to have my book find its way into people's homes? That's been amazing.

The vast majority of people buy the book, read the book and finish the book, as far as I can tell. A lot of amazing people have even contacted me about the book. But what I've learned is that some people just own the book, they don't read it. They put it in a pile that's teetering somewhere near their ceiling, blocking out the sun, and every once in a while they reshuffle this great pile, reprioritzing it, or, like me, moving some out of that pile and into the "I'm never going to read this" pile in my actual bookshelves.

And, believe it or not, it's not personal. They have a plan and it involves finishing certain books that have been started or projects that have been started and then dealing with the towering stack of books. Believe me, I understand. I have several piles myself.  

There's this horrible fear I had before my book was published: that no one would ever read my book. Then, little did I know, but there was this horrible fear I had the second it was published: that someone would read it.

My book came out in paperback about a month before its Kindle edition so no one could get it instantly, they had to wait for delivery. Immediately, my most loyal fans ordered it: my blogging buddies, my personal friends, my grown nieces, friends on Facebook. Then I sat in my house on pins and needles wondering what they thought of it. I hoped no one had gotten overnight shipping. I was actually hoping they all had ordered the "covered wagon" shipping option from Amazon, so that it would take months to get to them. I counted off the days for mail time and reading time. I wondered if there was going to be that awful dead silence when people don't want to say anything bad and so say nothing at all? 

Then a nice comment came in. Okay, it was from someone who's related to me by blood, but still. Honestly, it was a relief just to breath again.  

Please visit Kristen over at Motherese this week as she's giving away a copy of Looking Up this week. She posted her review of the book on Monday and will be posting an interview with me on Thursday!

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You can buy Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie on Amazon.com in Kindle or paperback versions, on Barnes & Noble.com, in many libraries and in Changing Hands Book Store in the Phoenix area.