about this author

Keep a Journal, Save a Life

Since childhood I’ve made a habit of writing a great many words that I will never re-read. I’m not talking about shopping lists or the family to-do reminders I stick on the refrigerator door. Nor do I mean the first, second, and sometimes twelfth story drafts whose natural home is the wastebasket. I’m talking about the volumes that I generate for the sheer act of writing: my journals.

They’re proliferating as I get older. I have several handwritten diaries and dream logs in progress at any given time, plus crates of completed journals that fill my office closet. I have date books that chart memorable phone calls, notebooks for emerging characters and story lines, and boxes of assorted images and ideas scribbled down on loose-leaf. Not to mention this computer diary.

All these journal variations constitute my personal writing workout. Composing an impromptu theme helps combat fear-of-white-paper syndrome, encourages a personal syntax and voice, and forces me to think onto the page. It gives me practice, and practice supposedly makes perfect — Perish the thought! The particular wonderfulness of journals is that they do not require either perfection or the judgment that defines perfection. For journals need not be read. How often have I sat writing for hours — about my son’s first slouches toward adolescence, for example, or the death of a long-ago lover, or my sense of abject helplessness in the face of my best friend’s cancer — only to close the journal and never look at these outpourings again. This liberates the act of writing from the fear of scrutiny. And it turns the journal into a confidante who really never will tell.

Unless I want her to. And then, she just might save a life.

That sounds like hyperbole, but I mean it. The essence of the journal is truth and honesty. And when the truth is released, it really does have the power to save lives. I first discovered this when I drew on my teenage diaries to write a memoir about anorexia nervosa, which was published more than twenty years ago. The diaries contained an intensity that I could never have re-created without them. This, for instance, from 1970, when I was seventeen:

Sometimes it happens in New York that I’ll walk down the street and feel totally alive. I can dive in and become part of the puzzle, and it’s actually fun … There is so much to see, so much that is constantly new that it’s like a liberation from all the petty junk inside me. I can almost get away from the trap of my hunger, my schedule, my emotions, my damned compulsions. Oh, God, how I despise myself for being so weak! I wish I could get out of my body entirely and fly!

Going back through these entries and writing the memoir not only released me from anorexia, but allowed me to offer an authentic perspective to others struggling with the disorder.

Later my journal helped save a life in an even more specific way.

I had become friends in Los Angeles in 1997 with a young Nigerian writer named Akin Adesokan. Akin was a brave literary talent, who chose to write freely of his life and dreams in spite of the oppressive regime of Nigeria’s brutal dictator at the time, Sani Abacha. Following his fellowship in America, Akin attempted to go home but was arrested without charge as he crossed the Nigerian border. For several weeks no one knew where he was being held or even if he was alive. Many other Nigerians, including Akin’s friend Ken Saro-Wiwa, had been murdered for writing their minds.

I feared the worst for Akin. In my journal I tried to recall his gentle grace and intellect, his sweetness and his talent. I wrote about our first meeting, his passion for literature, and my futile attempts to persuade him not to return to Nigeria.

“My writing is not political,” he’d say.

“But some of your friends are.”

“I am not responsible for what they do.”

“Does your government make such distinction?”

“I just want to write.”

“You have to be alive to write,” I said.

I recorded the nightmare to let it out.

Then I took a second look. Yes, I re-read the entry. Hardly perfect but heartfelt and honest, it told a side of Akin’s story that the authorities in Nigeria had to know and that none of Akin’s compatriots there could get across on their own: the world was watching.

I sent a copy of the entry to my colleagues at PEN, the global literary organization that advocates on behalf of imprisoned writers, and a few days later this slice of my journal was published by Akin’ss supporters in the Nigerian newspaper Post Express.

That same morning Akin believed he was to be executed. Then one of his prison guards passed him a copy of the paper. A few days later he was freed. And today Akin Adesokan is back in America, enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Cornell University.

Today’s journals are tomorrow’s testaments. But as gratifying as it was to help Akin, my reason for filling these books is hardly heroic. It’s selfish. For, day in and day out, the primary life my journals are saving is my own.

I write these private entries as I speak thoughts I may never think again, as I tour places I may never visit again, or view art that I may see only once in my lifetime. For the experience. For the memory. For the reflection through words not of any grand gesture or intent, but of one single moment of being.

When and if I revisit these specific words, for example, that sense of being will flood back over and amaze me. I will see myself in my torn robe and nightshirt, my boy just eleven and in a new school, my husband approaching the height of his career. I will hear the quiet of my morning house before the phone calls begin, the drone of traffic pouring down Westwood Boulevard, the sparrows bickering on the telephone wires high above my yard. I will feel the chill of the floor beneath the bare soles of my feet.

I will smile nostalgically and shake my head. This is my life, saved.