Handwritten notebooks
For over twenty years I wrote for myself, by hand, every single day.
I miss it. Keeping a journal gave me a wonderfully rich inner life.
This Substack is just pages taken from my notebooks. I intend to post selections that feel embarrassing—I’m already such an open book, and a shameless one, so if there’s something even I am embarrassed about, let’s out with it already. So I’ll post the morally incriminating and the ridiculous. A lot of my private writing was about how trying to live up to my lofty aspirations, while at the same time being a deeply sardonic bitch who hated everything. Like everyone, my most honest writing was so cringe it was basically dark comedy.
I’ll also just post the pages that blow my mind, where I wrote my way into resonance and divined true wisdom, and also moments I don’t even remember now where some indelible aspect of myself got discovered by me for the first time. It’s so bizarre to retroactively see your personality and beliefs get created piece by piece. Bizarre and so fucking cool. I’ll post pages like that whenever I find them.
I am working on a novel at the moment, so writing smart things on Substack is beyond my capacity right now. But I want to play along! May these notebook pages from my past let me feel like I’m still spilling my guts to the world in new ways.
Totally unrelated, I’m an essayist. Please avail yourself of my brilliant published work and not just these private notebook pages! Or don’t. Half the point of this Substack is to chaotically undermine my good reputation, possibly as a person, definitely as a literary writer.
If you are unimpressed with my journal entries from twenty years ago, you are free to hand-write me a letter of complaint.