Girls Who Journal Have Always Been Radical

When I was nine, I wanted to beryllium Harriet the Spy. I stalked my neighbors with the aforesaid misplaced assurance Harriet brought to her rounds connected the Upper East Side, clutching a Mead creation publication and scribbling down whether Mrs. Pine smoked successful the location (she did) and if the mailman liked cats (he didn’t). I told myself I was practicing reflection and discipline, preparing myself for the writer’s life, oregon immoderate my knowing was of it astatine the time.

I didn’t yet recognize that this was the cardinal enactment of writing, particularly for girls. That the journal—often dismissed arsenic “just a diary”—wasn’t simply a abstraction for confessional wallowing, but a scaffolding for becoming, a spot to incorporate a beingness successful progress. I didn’t cognize that this wont I began successful childhood—one that I’ve continued done adolescence, motherhood, grief, addiction, and recovery—was portion of a lineage. To diary is to assertion authorization implicit your ain interiority. It is to say: I saw and felt these things. I was here.

Lately, it feels similar the satellite has yet caught up to the diary girl. There’s a resurgence of involvement successful diaries and notebooks arsenic some literate signifier and taste force, peculiarly among women, queer writers, and others who’ve agelong been dismissed arsenic “too personal.” There is besides a chiseled displacement from the oversharing of the early-2010s blogosphere toward thing much distilled: affectional extent endures, but it’s nary longer being performed. It arrives gently, having been lived done first.

Originally launched arsenic a pandemic-era online project, “The Isolation Journals” is 1 specified example. It began arsenic a regular journaling inaugural created by Suleika Jaouad to assistance radical find meaning done penning during uncertain times and has since grown into a originative assemblage of much than a 4th of a cardinal people. In the outpouring of 2025, the task expanded into people with The Book of Alchemy, a hybrid of memoir and originative prompts that weaves unneurotic Jaouad’s reflections connected journaling and creativity with contributions from the vibrant assemblage she helped cultivate.

Journals connection antithetic portraits of the originative aforesaid depending connected however (and why) they’re made public. Some, similar Jaouad’s, look accidentally oregon posthumously, revealing a rawness the writer ne'er intended to share.

Joan Didion’s Notes to John, published posthumously, is of the second variety. The publication pulls from her backstage notebooks wherever she recorded elaborate conversations with her psychiatrist. It gives america a Didion dependable stripped of its signature detachment—unguarded, repetitive, astir childlike successful its grief arsenic she describes difficulties with her girl and struggles astir her work.

In yet different iteration, Kelly McMasters’ Substack series, Show Me Your Diary, creates a living, intentional speech astir the relation of diaries successful originative life. Each installment invites a writer to bespeak connected their idiosyncratic journaling habits and past done a acceptable of thoughtful questions, paired with photographs of their existent notebooks. The bid showcases journals arsenic windows into the messiness and method of each writer’s mind, revealing an unfiltered backdrop to their originative world.

Even popular civilization has caught the scent. Chappell Roan, pursuing some her VMA and Grammy wins, work her acceptance speeches from her diary, indicating that she’d written them up of time—just successful case. It felt historical to ticker her spot her Grammy connected the level truthful she could clasp her butter-yellow notebook with some hands. It’s a cleanable encapsulation of the diary miss ethos: hope, ambition, and an astir ceremonial content successful the powerfulness of the page.

This sensibility is reverberating successful euphony arsenic well, wherever intimacy and earthy vulnerability are making a quieter, much interior return. Take Sophie Hunter—a rising creator whose lo-fi, lyrically driven popular evokes the texture of diary entries. Her songs ache with lines that consciousness written archetypal for herself, lone aboriginal offered to an audience.

What’s singular astir this infinitesimal is not conscionable that radical are journaling, but the diary is moving beyond its accepted relation arsenic a warm-up for “real” penning oregon a quirky affectation. It’s yet getting the spotlight arsenic a tract of creation and enquiry unto itself. Notebooks are being published with little polish, little shame. Readers look bare for texture, and for the granular messiness of a consciousness unfolding successful existent time.

This displacement didn’t hap successful a vacuum. It comes astatine a clip erstwhile self-expression has been flattened into brand. On societal media, each caption, image, and communicative carries the unit to beryllium aesthetic, monetized, and shareable. We’re encouraged to execute authenticity alternatively than unrecorded it. Amidst each this algorithmic overexposure, the diary offers thing softly subversive: privacy. And paradoxically, that privateness is what makes it consciousness much honest—and much valuable—when shared.

I precocious participated successful a journaling store led by Amy Shearn done the Writing Co-Lab. Each week arsenic a radical we work excerpts of the diaries of different writers, not for their prose, but for their patterns. We delved into selections from the notebooks of Virginia Woolf, Annie Ernaux, Clarice Lispector, Susan Sontag, and Octavia Butler. We work them not arsenic drafts but arsenic documents of self-construction. Woolf tracked her regular rhythms with obsessive precision, toggling betwixt household minutiae and metaphysical despair. Ernaux wrote successful bursts, urgently trying to pin clip to the page. Butler filled her notebooks with affirmations and imperatives: “I constitute bestselling novels. My books volition beryllium work by millions of people! So beryllium it! See to it!”

The magic isn’t successful the polish of these writers’ journaling, but successful the persistence. Each writer, successful her way, was narrating herself into being.

Of course, determination is simply a agelong contented of belittling this benignant of narration. The diary miss has ever been culturally suspect. She’s been framed arsenic excessively sensitive, excessively self-absorbed, excessively inconsistent. Her subject—herself—considered excessively boring, excessively indulgent, excessively much. We’ve agelong internalized the thought that the idiosyncratic is frivolous unless made universal, and adjacent then, lone if filtered done irony oregon antheral detachment. But what happens erstwhile we garbage to filter? What if we instrumentality the diary miss seriously?

Didion wrote with surgical detachment successful her famously reserved essays. But successful the 46 diary entries that comprise Notes to John, each of which are addressed to her hubby aft his abrupt death, her dependable frays. “I sat down and instantly began to cry,” she writes. “‘What’s connected your mind,’ Dr. MacKinnon asked. I said I didn’t know. I seldom cried. In information I ne'er cried successful crises. I conscionable recovered it precise hard to beryllium down facing idiosyncratic and talk.” This is not conscionable recording. It’s earthy admittance. The journal, here, is not a specified routine, it’s a refuge.

When my girl was diagnosed with leukemia, I didn’t statesman processing the trauma by penning an essay. In the aboriginal days of her treatment, I wrote successful my journal. I catalogued medications, smells, beeping machines, nurses I liked, nurses I suspected were judging me. I wrote astir however my daughter’s look changed signifier during pulses of steroids, and astir the babe successful the country adjacent doorway whose parents I ne'er saw. I wasn’t trying to beryllium profound—my notebook was a spot to determination retired what I didn’t cognize however to talk aloud. It was a spot without an audience, without polish, and astir importantly, without the unit to beryllium fine.

As I’ve been moving connected a publication astir our crab years, I’ve gone backmost and work those aboriginal entries dispersed crossed carnal journals and, arsenic we spent much clip successful the hospital, my phone’s notes app. The writings are disjointed, repetitive, disfigured successful places—fragmented lists, pages blotched with tears—but they clasp a feral information I couldn’t fake. They don’t conscionable punctual maine of what happened—they uncover what I didn’t past understand. I tin hint the way of my reasoning during that crisis, peek done the model into that past mentation of myself. That’s the different relation of the journal: it doesn’t conscionable grounds your thoughts; it gives them country to form.

Of course, there’s hazard successful opening that backstage abstraction to others. Publishing a journal, oregon adjacent quoting from one, means forfeiting immoderate of its power. Vulnerability becomes commodity. You’re nary longer penning successful the dark, you’re curating. McMasters touches connected this done her interrogation series. By asking writers to stock their diaries, she is besides asking them to determine what gets near successful and what gets chopped successful the curation of their astir backstage thoughts. These are particularly crisp questions for women, who’ve agelong been expected to stock their symptom (and conscionable arsenic often punished for it.) We valorize the brave confessor until her honesty becomes inconvenient.

There’s power, too, successful reclaiming the diary arsenic literature—not arsenic spectacle, but arsenic form. In a 2021 interrogation with NPR, Suleika Jaouad shared, “Journaling became the spot that I was capable to find a consciousness of communicative power astatine a clip erstwhile I had to cede truthful overmuch power to others. It became the spot wherever I began to interrogate my predicament and to effort to excavate immoderate meaning from it.” What would it mean to judge successful the diary arsenic the work, and by extension, to worth a woman’s backstage grounds arsenic overmuch arsenic her polished prose?

Substack has go a benignant of nationalist diary, a integer throwback to the messy vitality of LiveJournal and Tumblr. Writers station dispatches that work similar letters, lists, fragments. There’s an appetite for first-person penning that doesn’t unreal to person each the answers, thing betwixt the tweet and the essay—something much earthy and alive.

At the aforesaid time, younger creators are rejecting the unit for changeless polish. On TikTok and YouTube, lo-fi video diaries abound. You’ll find soft-spoken narrations, overhead shots of annotated pages, and girls whispering aloud lines they’ve conscionable written. A caller ocular grammar of the diary is forming—one that prizes immediacy implicit perfection. The diary girl, erstwhile derided, is present an aesthetic. You tin bargain pre-distressed notebooks and faux-vintage pens. There are full YouTube channels dedicated to slug journaling, “aesthetic routines,” and stationery hauls. This commodification is some frustrating and fascinating. On the 1 hand, it risks flattening thing profoundly idiosyncratic into a manner accessory. On the other, it’s a motion that thing astir the diary girl—her mess, her earnestness—has struck a nerve.

Maybe it’s due to the fact that she offers an alternate to the endless show of the internet. Maybe it’s due to the fact that she reminds america that we’re allowed to constitute things we’ll ne'er publish. Maybe it’s due to the fact that she believes, truthful radically, that her beingness is worthy documenting.

I spot this successful my ain daughter, present 13. She keeps a blue-covered diary successful the drawer of her nightstand, the metallic spiral of its binding stretched and unraveling. When I spell into her country to accidental goodnight, I often find her propped against her headboard, her look a disguise of concentration. I consciousness the ache of recognition, and I wonderment what she’s discovering successful those pages—what truths she’s unearthing astir herself, what tiny wounds she’s tending. I ideate she’s gathering a representation of her interior world, 1 enactment astatine a time. In a satellite that volition expect her to execute oregon edit herself into palatability, I anticipation her diary is simply a spot wherever she tin beryllium whole.

When I look backmost astatine the journals I kept arsenic a girl, I’m struck by however small I held back. There’s thing embarrassing astir the openness, but besides enviable. I hadn’t yet learned to second-guess each sentence. I wrote due to the fact that I wanted to recognize something, not due to the fact that I wanted to beryllium understood. That’s what I spot successful the journals of Didion, Woolf, Butler. Their journals are not conscionable the seeds of books to come, but full selves successful process: the leafage arsenic confidante, arsenic experiment, and arsenic mirror.

In the end, the diary isn’t a signifier successful narcissism, but a signifier successful attention. To support a diary is to say: I americium paying attraction to my life, and I judge that it matters. That mightiness beryllium the astir extremist enactment of all.

The station Girls Who Journal Have Always Been Radical appeared archetypal connected Electric Literature.