Women Diarists with Betsy Rubiner

Episode 316: Women Diarists with Betsy Rubiner [transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors] AMY: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers, join our Patreon community. Visit lostladiesoflit.com and click “Become a Patron” to find out more. KIM: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off books by forgotten women writers, or in today's case, women diarists. Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes. AMY: So Kim, I think we've briefly discussed diaries before because we happen to have covered quite a few fictional diaries on this show over the past six years, starting with our second lost lady, E.M. Delafield, and her Diary of a Provincial Lady. KIM: Yes, and since then we've covered Yiddish writer Miriam Karpilove's Diary of a Lonely Girl and Forbidden Notebook by Italian writer Alba de Céspedes AMY: I've also covered the famed 19th century diarist and artist Marie Bashkirtseff in a bonus episode I did last year. Bashkirtseff's chronicle of her high society Parisian life inspired a young Mary MacLane, living halfway around the world in Montana, to write her turn-of-the-century incredibly emo book, I Await the Devil's Coming, which is written in the form of journal entries. KIM: Those two young women wrote their journals with the express hope that they would be read by others. But in general, the idea of reading other people's diaries leaves me a little conflicted. In the case of Anne Frank, for example. How might she have felt about her private thoughts being made public? AMY: It's a great question. I think it's maybe one of the many reasons that I actually do not keep a diary. It stresses me out too much to think about what might become of it after my death. Is that crazy? KIM: No, I don't think so. All right. Well, our guest today has written a new book about the cultural history of diaries, and she explores these issues and so many others. Best of all, she's joining us to talk about some lost ladies who wrote privately so that they might understand themselves, chronicle their world, and leave a record for the future. AMY: Our guest writes about diarists, both celebrated and obscure, and she might even let us take a peek inside some of her own diary entries, some of which were once hidden away under lock and key. So let's raid all the secret hiding places and get started. [intro music plays] Our guest today, Betsy Rubiner, is a journalist who spent nine years as a reporter at The Des Moines Register and stints at a handful of other newspapers in the Midwest and the East Coast prior to that. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Time, USA Today, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. Betsy produces a travel blog called “Take Betsy With You,” and authored the travel book Fun With The Family in Iowa. Her most recent book, which is what brings her to the podcast today, is called Our Diaries, Ourselves: How Diarists Chronicle Their Lives and Document Our World. AMY: It was published by Beacon Press earlier this year. Betsy, we're so thrilled to speak with you. Welcome to the show. BETSY: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate your interest. AMY So, we mentioned the idea of a diary being under lock and key in our introduction, and this is a very specific version of a physical diary, I think, that society usually identifies as belonging to young girls. I was intrigued to learn in your book that the diary's association with girls and women helped propel the art of diary keeping in the 20th century, and yet maybe it also did a disservice to diary writing, in a sense. Could you talk a little bit about that? BETSY: Yeah. I frankly was surprised about that myself. Men have written diaries for eons. And some of the most famous and early diaries were men's diaries. And interestingly, men get credit for the diary form in some ways, even though women are the ones who are associated now with the diary. But I think that some scholars argue that the association with women and the feminine, quote unquote, is why diaries are not always a respected literary form. And so you do have people like J.D. Vance, for example. He says that he has a blog and it's like a diary, but “it's far more masculine.” AMY: Oh geez. Of course he needs to add that little addendum. KIM: So as you said, we know that men keep diaries too. I'm thinking of Samuel Pepys' diary from the 17th century. That's, like, perhaps maybe the most famous one. And then I loved James Boswell's London Journal too. That was so great. It was such a delight to read. Do you think diaries historically have been maybe a more important or more meaningful outlet for women? BETSY: You know, it's hard to say. Certainly the contemporary diary has been associated with women, in particular, venting, releasing their frustrations and their emotions. That's considered a feminine behavior, which I'm a little bit reluctant to label as such because gender is such a fraught topic in this day and age, and we're all kind of trying hard not to stereotype what feminine and masculine means but I think, yeah, there is certainly, for women who didn't have other avenues to express themselves this was a place where women could express their opinions. We know that Samuel Pepys' wife kept something resembling a diary, only because he writes in his diary that he destroyed it. He destroyed it with her begging him not to. He writes this, that she was tearful, begging him not to do this. And I was stunned when I learned that and just felt so sad for her. And it was also sadly pretty good evidence of how diaries by women were not valued, and as a result, they were not saved. Which, jumping ahead just a little bit, is partly why I wanted to save my diary and really loved the mission of women's archives in particular, which are dedicated to saving a record of women. Not even just diaries. Letters, correspondence, professional papers. AMY: That anecdote leads me to this idea of diaries being potentially dangerous, scandalous, explosive. Maybe she was writing something in there that he didn't want the world to know. BETSY: Oh, he says that. He mentions it, to some effect, he says something that had some complaints and they were basically true. AMY: Of course they were. BETSY: He was a known philanderer. KIM: There you go. BETSY: But I guess what was in there was maybe content that was not flattering to him, about him, AMY: And how did he find out? When we did our episode on Italian writer Alba de Cespedes, we talked about her novel Forbidden Notebook, and the protagonist in that book literally hides her journal from her family like it's radioactive. She thinks it's illicit because it keeps all of her secret thoughts inside BETSY: Actually, I was so delighted when I saw that you had come across that novel, because I had as well. And I mean, it was very intense what she was trying to do with her diary. And at the end she says “All women hide a black notebook, a forbidden diary and they all have to destroy it.” KIM: That’s such a great quote. I love that. But, you know, by the same token, many diaries are just by their very nature sort of run-of-the-mill, right? They're accounts of a person's daily life. Like, what I had for dinner, or who left a calling card, or whatever. BETSY: Right. AMY: Yeah, and I think that's one of the reasons that I never really keep a diary as an adult, because I think it would just bore me, let alone anyone else in posterity, you know? But you, argue, Betsy, that there is incredible value in some of the things I would consider mundane about my life BETSY: Yeah, One of the most famous women's diaries out there is by Martha Ballard. I'll mention it a little bit later. But she was a midwife during the 1700s, early 1800s her diary was discovered by a budding young American historian who was trying to find out details about the lives of in early America. And she found this diary, which other people had looked at and dismissed as full of trivia. To her, it was a goldmine. And there is another writer who I cite. I really like this book, so I just wanted to mention it. It's called The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing, and it's by Jennifer Senior. She writes a very spirited defense of diaries that we would dismiss as “boring.” I think it is kind of interesting that you have a diary that's really about the ordinary moments in life, that's really almost more accurate in some ways about what life is like than the real dramatic moments, the real highs, the real lows. Does that mean it's scintillating to read? Maybe not. But is it a more accurate reflection of what life is like? It's an interesting question AMY: Yeah. We're too close to it. I actually have seen a comedy Instagram account where somebody's acting like a museum curator for our current existence right now, and they walk through a modern home, and they're like, "This was called a microwave, and it was a box that would heat the..." You know? So because in 500 years, people are gonna be like, "What the hell is that thing, and why were they using it?" So in that sense, when you are reading really old diaries, you're like, "Oh wow, people used to do that? That's wild." Yeah KIM: Totally. BETSY: Yeah. KIM: So Amy, you might not keep a written diary, but there's Substack or, you know, even your Instagram feed (if anyone's still using it), could be considered a form of chronicling our lives, right, Betsy? BETSY: Yes, and I think that was something that I found very surprising because it just hadn't occurred to me. I do have a Facebook account. I don't use them all that much. I have a blog. I never thought of those as diaries. So when I heard people referring to them as potential diaries, I thought, "Okay, I have to think about that a little bit." Which then forced me to really think about what a diary is. The two main criteria for a diary that I came up with was that it's daily. So it's a series of chronological entries. and then the other one has to do something to do with yourself. I was trying to differentiate it from notes that people keep for their work. Marie Curie was an interesting one, because she kept notes on her very important research, but she also kept a personal diary. Her diary was literally believed to be radioactive because of the work that she did, so it was locked away in a specific type of box. AMY: That's wild. I never heard that story. KIM: Yeah. BETSY: If you say that are the two criteria, you know, the, the dailiness, the entries, and self, then a blog works. A Facebook, TikTok… those do work. I would say that it also has to do with intent, and I talked to a number of bloggers and, you know, people that keep various social media who said, “I see this as a diary." But I also talked to someone who said, "I do not see it as a diary," myself included. AMY: Can you imagine if Marie Bashkirtseff had social media? I mean, she would be the biggest influencer around. You even talk in your book about some people actually treating their diary as if they are writing to an imaginary person BETSY: Yeah. I mean, certainly Anne Frank is a good example of that. I mean she wrote “Dear Kitty,” although I didn't realize that she wrote to a number of different people, some of whom were real as opposed to imaginary. Uh Patty Smith, I believe, referred to writing to an imaginary friend of some sort. For some people, I think it’s an easier thing to write if you're writing to somebody, so it feels like a letter. But you know, I have to add that back in the 1800s, women were writing diaries that were meant to be read later, and sometimes they read each other's diaries which really surprised me. So the whole notion of “the diary is private” got turned on its head when I was looking into it more. KIM: Yeah, that was so interesting um, hearing about that. I can imagine sitting around and, like, having someone read your diary. I mean, well, I guess you'd be thinking about what you put in it and knowing that people were going to read it. BETSY: Right. KIM: I guess there can be, not that this is a bad thing, but sort of a navel-gazing aspect to keeping a diary. And it was fascinating to learn in your book that the Age of Enlightenment had a lot to do with popularizing this habit. Can you talk a little bit about what that time in history was like that drove people to chronicle their lives in this way? BETSY: Yeah. My understanding from some scholars is that from the 1500s into the 1700s, the Enlightenment saw the rise of the notion of the individual and the individual's ability to chart her course in life. So it was determined less by family, class, property ownership, religion. So this modern individual with this strong sense of self and story worth telling viewed the diary as a vehicle for expression. And then later in the late 20th century, there was a focus more on self and on emotions. And that had to do by the 1800s with these changing ideas about the self. So it had to do with, you know, the psychoanalysis, discovery of the unconscious and the individual consciousness. It had to do with the split between the private and public spheres brought by the Industrial Revolution, and then what some have referred to as the romantic discovery of the secular self. So the self became the diary subject. So that's where you get people like um Marie Bashkirtsef really talking about using the diary as secret (well, in her case, it wasn't secret.) But a record of one's inner life full of personal reflection and emotion. So I think that's where that part of the secret diary came from. There's at least one historian that I mention who says that there was sort of this great American diary project in the '60s and '70s, which is when I grew up and had my first diary. And that diaries were promoted for girls for everything from Seventeen magazine to, you know, different manufacturers of even things like sanitary products. Which I found pretty fascinating. So yeah, I mean, there is an argument to be made that we were definitely um to write diaries. And still to this day, I mean, I think there's a lot more, open-mindedness now. I have two grandsons. I would get my grandsons a diary or a journal. I might call it a journal. One of my grandsons has been reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid. KIM: Oh yeah. Mm-hmm. Perfect. BETSY: Which actually does raise the issue. There's something in that book early on where he's very careful and says, "It's not a diary, it's a journal." Because he's worried about being called a sissy. KIM: I remember getting my first diary like I remember getting my first Barbie You know? Like, I still remember what they both look like. BETSY: Yeah. KIM: Sort of changing topic a little bit, but Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that diary writing does not count as writing. So what would you say about that sentiment? Agree, disagree? BETSY: Well, Anais Nin would disagree with that one, I think. You know, I mean, that's her opinion. She was a great novelist and great essayist, so I can see how she would think her unfinished, less polished writing in her diary was not... Although today, some people think that some of her best writing was in her diaries. KIM: Interesting. Mm-hmm. BETSY: That’s another avenue of interest. But I think yeah, it's writing. Is it great literature? Uh you know, I'll leave that to the literature scholars to discuss. Anais Nin, who really, her real lasting legacy is diary, and she knew that by the time she was starting to have her diary published. I think she certainly would argue – and I mention this in the book a different quote from her, where, yeah, it is writing. I also think, you know, Woolf's diary was first published by her husband as a writer's diary, and he pulled out selectively all the stuff where the diary was useful to her creative process, Certainly her diary was instrumental in her writing process for her other AMY: It's like a place to workshop things, and I'm thinking about how many songwriters use diaries to, you know, flesh out ideas for lyrics and things like that. BETSY: Yeah. I do have in the book everybody from Taylor Swift to Alanis Morissette to Lucy Dacus you know, contemporary pop singers or singer-songwriters you know, they make no apologies about using their diaries to inform their other work that goes out to the world AMY: So Betsy, one of the things that I loved about the way you structured your book is that it, at the ending of various sections, you share, your own diary entries from various points in your life, including when you were a little girl and I was wondering if you might be willing to share a little portion of that. I know it takes some bravery, I mean, you did publish it, so... BETSY: I did. That was one of the sort of editorial decisions that I had to make. It's like, how much of my diary goes in here? Is it interesting to other people? You know, it's interesting to me, but maybe it's not to other people. I kept hearing over and over again that diaries capture our life and times. So I thought, "All right. I'll see how that works." So I looked at, okay, what were the big events of the '70s, '80s, '90s? Did I, in fact, record any of those things? And it was interesting to see, and it was fun to go back. I guess I'll just give you, like, maybe three of them so you can have an idea. The first date I have is September 20th, 1973. So this is what I wrote: "We watched Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the tennis Battle of the Sexes. It was a great game. I have tennis in school. I hope I get good. AMY: Oh, I love it. I mean, that was a big moment. BETSY: Yeah, it was. So it was pretty cool to find that, and I just read Billie Jean King's autobiography recently, and I was like, "Yeah, it made an impact on me." I mean, and I was just, you know, little Betsy in Huntington Woods, Michigan, writing in my diary. I'll read you two more. September 11th, 2001. You probably know where we're going with this one. “For a few frightening hours this morning, all of our safety was unclear. Writing this now, it all sounds like a compact, tidy story, but as it unfolded, it was just one stunning, chaotic upheaval after another with no sense of when it would end or what was actually happening. I raced to the television where I saw the World Trade Tower engulfed in smoke. I slumped into a chair, my hand to my mouth, my heart pounding, my eyes tearing. Like millions of other people watching today, I was stunned. I tried to explain it to the kids what was going on without frightening them. Who knows if I succeeded?” That gives me chills just reading it. AMY: Yeah, me too. BETSY: And then I'll read you one last one. Well, actually, there's two last ones if you want. “September 27th, 2018. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, a name few of us knew 10 days ago, stood in front of a national television audience and told a wrenching story.” And then March 2nd, 2020. “The coronavirus scare seems to be intensifying. I tried to get some wet wipes at the local Walgreens. Sold out.” AMY: So brief, it's just a quick jotting down, but it tells us so much. We all can remember along with you. BETSY: Yes. And I should probably add that those are just excerpts. AMY: There was more of it? Okay. BETSY: There was a lot of in those quotes KIM: So, big moments in our collective history that you were weighing in on there, and it's really interesting to hear it recapped distance. I mean, it almost makes it feel like you're right there again. and I'm sure there's also a lot more personal, more private, material within your diaries, which gets to this conundrum that Amy was wondering about initially in our introduction to this episode. What happens to diaries when the writer leaves this world? So can you talk about that? BETSY: Well that was a big problem for me And you know, I'm at an age where I'm writing a will. I'm downsizing. We moved from a big house in Iowa to a smaller apartment in Chicago. So what do I do with all these diaries? And should they outlive me? I mean, there are people who burn their diaries, and I get it. And they're welcome to do that. I think historians sort of cringe when they hear that because they're hoping that some of those diaries can be used to tell us what women's lives were like. So I did not want my kids reading my diary, my family reading my diary. But then I decided I couldn't throw them away. So what do you do? And that's where I initially discovered women's archives. They have ways of safeguarding your diary. So for example, I am donating my diary to a women's archive, but I'm not donating it until after I die. And also, I'm going to seal it for a number of years so that the people that are mentioned in it are protected. And frankly, if you write a diary as long as I have you know, my diary is not just, you know, full of slanderous comments about other people. I'm writing about a lot of other stuff. But you do put stuff in there that is personal to you and your relationships. I think it's fairly common with diaries that people do that. So I really wanted to protect the people that were in the diary. You know, I've tried to structure my donation in a way that protects them, but there is sort of an unresolved issue, to be honest. I didn't realize that diaries are increasingly posted online. And it's a great resource for those of us who wanna read about, you know, young girls during the Civil War or, you know, all kinds of, you know, women's travel diaries from the 19th century. When I thought about my diary actually being posted online, it really gave me pause. And frankly, towards the end of the period when I was writing this book, AI became more of a thing, and that really gave me pause. So I have not entirely resolved that issue yet in terms of how I've structured my diary donation. I'm kinda waiting to see how the AI thing plays out a little bit more. But, you know, the argument is if you don't let your diary be posted online or digitized, probably no one's gonna read them in the future. The flip side is, yeah, you can't control things when they're posted online and the world sees them. Certainly I inquired with the archive that I'm donating to and was assured that they're not gonna throw my diary online with the people that it may affect still alive. You know, you really have to ask because archives do different things, I learned, and have different policies. And there's some legal issues there, and some privacy issues, and some copyright issues that get very sort of, particular. But at any rate, that is just definitely something that I had to think about more than... I did not realize I was gonna have to deal with my diary potentially being online someday. You're worried about your diary, somebody picking it up and reading it. The idea that they can click on a link and there it is; that's a whole other ball of wax! AMY: I didn't even realize until I read your book that this was a thing that you could do. I thought you had to be somebody tremendously important or famous for your diary to be preserved. BETSY: I did not know that either. And Europe appears to have gotten there first. I mean, women's archives and all archives have collected diaries for years. But certainly during the women's movement women wanted to write themselves into history, and they needed documents, and so they made a more concerted effort to create these women's archives. Diary archives is a whole other thing that I had no idea existed. And I found them first in Europe. These are archives that specifically collect the unpublished writing of ordinary people and write them into history. And that blew me away. I just thought, wow. And at the time, I could not find one in the United States. Then I found one kind of towards the end of my research part of my book. There is something called the American Diary Project that started online initially. And then I believe by 2024, they had a physical brick and mortar location in Cleveland. But it's really more intended to be an online resource. So you have to decide if you're comfortable with that. AMY: It almost reminds me of donating your body to science after you die because it's generous in a lot of ways, but it's also scary and vulnerable. Um, you are truly laying yourself bare. BETSY: Yes. Yeah, definitely. I make that sort of connection as well. I mean, I sort of said, "Okay, if I could donate my body to science, can I donate my thoughts? I thought, "Yeah, I can under certain conditions.” KIM: And also the idea of once you have decided that you're maybe gonna take this step, does it change the way you continue to write in your diary for the rest of your life, right? BETSY: That was the consequence for me that was not necessarily great. I really didn't anticipate that risk. I was thinking more in terms of, you know, how is it gonna affect other people? You know, but I didn't realize that it would make me self-conscious when I'm actually writing. So, I'm trying to guard against that because my diary has been such an important way for me to just let it all hang out, so to speak, and be myself. And if I can't be myself on any given day in my diary, then why write it? Different people have different reasons for writing their diaries, but for me, that's a big one. And so I'm just a little bit more circumspect. And I'm trying to walk that line. KIM: That seems like a difficult conundrum, to wanna be able to keep writing the way you wrote, but knowing it’s going to be read for, for certain. Okay. So we've got a little thing coming up now that we wanted to do. In your book, you reference so many diaries of all stripes, and they really sound fascinating. So we asked you to narrow the scope a little for this episode so we could check out five. lost ladies with gripping diaries that our listeners would wanna hear about. AMY: Tell us who we should look into, basically. BETSY: Okay And I do wanna offer a little bit of a which is that some of these people that I suggest, they're all diarists. They all kept diaries. They weren't necessarily... they weren't Anaïs Nin. But their diary really shed life on who they were as people. I also wanna add that You're not gonna pick up some of these and have a verbatim diary You're gonna have a biography that folds in diary quotes or is informed by a diary, just so you know. So the ones that I came up with, I mentioned before, is Martha Ballard. She was a white midwife in Maine And her diary inspired and is heavily quoted in the 1990 nonfiction book, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785 to 1812, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who is a historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for history, and inspired, I should add, a lot of other people to use diaries in the way that she used them. And so the title really aptly describes a historian's approach. She calls it a historical biography/microhistory. The other thing that might be fun for people to read is the 2023 novel The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon, which It's based on Martha Ballard's diary as well, but it's fiction. and then the second one is Anne Lister, and she is considered by some to be the first modern lesbian. She was a very unconventional English landowner in Northern England. Her diaries from the 1800s inspired the 2019 BBC TV historical drama series, “Gentleman Jack.” AMY: I think that was on HBO too, I think. Yeah BETSY: Yes, it was. Yeah. I believe it was HBO, but certainly something I saw I think before I was writing this book. She's a very interesting character, and that is much more of a diary. The third one is Emilie Davis. She was a Black domestic worker and dressmaker in the early 20-- in her early 20s, excuse me. Who was living in Philadelphia, and she wrote during the Civil War era. So that's really interesting just to get the perspective of a young free Black woman during the Civil War era. And the interesting thing too about the diary is that two different groups of historians got ahold of it and published two quite different approaches to the diary. So there's one called Emilie Davis' Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia 1863 to 1865, and that's edited by Judith Giesberg. The other one is called Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Francis Davis by Karsonya Wise Whitehead. And she uses the diary entries to produce a quote, unquote " her-storical, reconstruction" of Davis' life as seen through a Black feminist lens. So they're quite different. And they have a different approach to even how they transcribe the diary. I did a little comparison in the book of, like, two different interpretations of one diary entry, which just gives you an entry into the challenge that these diaries present for somebody that's going to put them forth in the world. Because I don't know about you, but my diary is very sloppy. My handwriting is terrible. My spelling is terrible. I don't care. So you figure it out. And that's what they had to do in this. The fourth one I would mention is Frances Anne Rollin. There's a real interest right now in 19th century African American women's diaries. Um, and a lot of work is being done to discover these diaries and make them public. And so this is one that just came out recently. In 2025 it was published, and it's called The Reconstruction Diary of Frances Anne Rollin. She's really a fascinating character. She was a Black suffragist, biographer … and this is her 1868 post-Civil War diary, which is considered one of the earliest known diaries by a Southern Black woman. Her diary documents Reconstruction era life in South Carolina, her first year of marriage, and the publication of her biography of the highest-ranking Black person in the military, which is apparently the first full-length biography written by an African American. KIM: Wow. BETSY: Then for something very different, we have Candida Royale. That was her adult film name. Her regular name is Candace Vadala, and she was a feminist porn star/director during the 1970s and '80s, she kept a diary for 40 years, starting at age 11. A 2024 biography/microhistory by historian Jane Kamensky was based on the diary and other sources and includes diary excerpts, and that's called Candida Royale and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below. AMY: I can hear the faint sound of all of our listeners rushing to their computer to get that one. Um, Wow. But listeners, we are going to include all of those titles in our show notes that Betsy just mentioned. This is only really a fraction of the lost ladies that Betsy includes in her book. There are so many others that I would love to eventually investigate, and I'm gonna keep your book on my desk as, like, a potential future lost ladies database there, 'cause there's so many. Um, did you discover any diaries that were just extremely unusual? BETSY: Yes, I did. And I mean, some of them had to do with the content. But I think it's the materiality of the diaries that really fascinated me. So, I spent a wonderful afternoon at the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a woman who's doing this incredible project to lift up the diaries in their collection. This is, like, one of the leading and oldest women's archives in the country. So there was a diary written on toilet paper. It came in this box that looked like the fanciest gift-wrapped toilet paper you would ever see. And we opened up, because the people that were preserving it, you know, did these things to make sure that it was protected. But we used our special archival materials to, like, carefully unroll it, almost like a Torah. And there was a diary written on toilet paper, written by a woman who was in a shelter for battered women, and apparently, this was what she had to write on. AMY: Wow BETSY: So that one definitely blew me away. There was another one where the diary was written on the back of wallpaper samples, and apparently, this diarist's spouse was a wallpaper salesperson which I just loved. And then there's just sometimes people that just do unusual things with their diaries, like sneezes. AMY: Oh my gosh. OCD. BETSY: You know, people, you could do whatever you want! AMY: Yeah. KIM: That's unusual. I didn't expect that. BETSY: That one was fun. And then I did love the diary that I came across at the Great Diary Project which is the name of the diary archive in England. And apparently these are still available today. They're dairy diaries, it was basically produced by the dairy industry in England as a promotion, and it's been going on forever. It's a physical diary that you can buy that has dairy recipes in it on the pages. And that's the other thing about a diary that's interesting is I learned that this, quote-unquote, "paratext," material that's in your diary that is not what you wrote but is in a manufactured diary, can also give you hints to what life was like. So here is a diary produced by the dairy industry, and it's got these recipes and you're like, "Did people really eat these strange recipes? Was this aspirational?" I mean, some of the recipes are just... I got so distracted by the recipes that I hardly even looked at what the diarist was writing, to be honest. But you know, that's the thing that, like, some of my old pre-printed diaries have things like you know, astrology and those things give you an indication of what was important at that time AMY: Last year for Christmas, I gave my mother-in-law an anthology called Secret Voices: A Year of Women's Diaries by Sarah Gristwood. So there are entries for each day of the calendar year, which is a really fun way to read it, y- you know, so just a few each day. They're very short. Um, And she actually promised to re-gift it to me this Christmas, you know, after she's been through it. Are there any other collections of diaries similar to that one that you'd recommend where you can just get kind of like a smattering of all different sorts of diary entries? BETSY: Yes, to some extent. That one I actually do mention in my book. It came out towards, I think, the end of when I was reporting and somebody flagged me on it. That one is really um, really interesting approach. There's a couple of different ones that are not quite as probably as concise as that. But there's a famous one that's not just women's diaries called The Assassin's Cloak, that has women in it. But I would say for women in particular, there's a couple different ones. The Diaries of Girls and Women, A Midwestern Sampler edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers. That's from two thousand and one. There's another one called A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from seventeen sixty-four to present. That's from back in nineteen eighty-five. That's edited by Margo Culley. There's another one called Revelations: Diaries of Women. That's from nineteen seventy-four edited by Mary Jane Moffitt and Charlotte Palmer. And then there's some collections of African American women's life writing that includes some diaries. It's not exclusively diaries, but it's also letters, memoirs, oral histories. Two that I really like and that were very influential. One is called Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women. It's edited by Patricia Bell-Scott. And then the other one is We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century edited by Dorothy Sterling. KIM: This has been such a fascinating discussion, And I have to say, the entire time I was reading your book, which was so fun, I was thinking about my mom because she kept diaries. Um, and I saved a few of them. There was kind of like a mass getting rid of things really quickly, unfortunately. Um, and I wish, after I read your book, the whole time I was thinking, "I wish I had kept them," because, um, you know, they were a lot of mundane details, but there were also those moments that I read like, wait to see Kim," you know, "We're gonna go see her in a week in San Francisco," or whatever, and those were so precious. I saved a few of them. Those entries were so precious to me. BETSY: I have a handful of my mom's diaries. like you, I wish I'd kept more. Would I have sat around reading them all? Maybe not. But just having them and, you know, in my case, my mom wrote a travel diary. And I looked at it initially as just, oh, I'm just gonna find out tips for where, you know, where did mom go in Japan? Or where did she go in Scandinavia? then having learned all that I learned in this book, I revisited the diary and I thought, "Oh my God." I was reading this really, not wrong, but just reading it in such a different way. All of a sudden there was my mom's voice, there was my mom's handwriting, there was my mom's opinions, and it was especially poignant for me because my mother had early onset Alzheimer's, so she lost her voice, and she couldn't write, and she couldn't read, and she couldn't speak. And I had this documentation of who she had been in my hand. you know, a diary that's a family member's can be a really precious thing to hold onto. AMY: A time capsule in so many ways. And even though the vast majority of diaries are ephemeral, we just have to remember also how important they were for the person who was writing them. If they weren't important, they wouldn't have continued to write them.So it gave them some sort of value in their lifetime to keep that record, BETSY: Right. And that's exactly what Jennifer Senior writes in her book, The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing, where she looks at her distant relative, Annie Ray's diary. That's exactly what she says. I mean, it had value for that person. It wasn't written necessarily for us at all. But there's a reason a vast variety of people, men and women to their diaries and want to write about themselves and the world around them KIM: Listeners, if you enjoyed this discussion about diaries, you’ll definitely wanna pick up a copy of Betsy's book. We will link to it in our show notes. This has been so much fun. Thanks for joining us today! BETSY: Oh, it's absolutely my pleasure. I really enjoyed it. AMY: So that's all for today's episode. If you liked what you heard, consider giving us a rating and review wherever you listen. 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