Susan Sontag's Journals

I haven't read Reborn yet, but I want to.

As Daryll Pickney describes it in his New Yorker review:

Sontag’s “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $25), edited by her son, David Rieff, is a fascinating document of her apprenticeship, charting her earnest quest for education, identity, and voice. The volume takes us from her last days at North Hollywood High School to the year that, now living in New York, she published her first novel, “The Benefactor.”

NPR's John Freeman points out that:

Reborn is full of earnest exhortations to read books (Moll Flanders, another tale of self-creation) and smile less ("Think of Blake. He didn't smile for others"), as well as descriptions of lectures attended and films inhaled, sometimes at the rate of three a day.

I'll admit that posthumously publishing someone's journals is worse than hanging their dirty undies out to dry (and for everyone to see), and the fact that it was her own son who published them is a bit...bothersome. But, according to Richard Eder of The New York Times, Rieff published the journals knowing that "Sontag had left her papers without restrictions to the University of California, Los Angeles. If he did not do the job, thus at least keeping some control, someone else would."

I guess Junior didn't think he could have destroyed the journals himself (which is what he says his mother would have done were she alive). And I'm glad he didn't. Here's the thing about seeing someone's dirty undies blowing in the breeze: it's hard not to look.

Besides, I love reading journals written during a period of intense creativity. Take Kafka's journal entries produced during the writing of The Trial. They're wonderful insights into not only the writer's mind, but also into the process of writing.

For example:

August 29. The end of one chapter a failure; another chapter, which began beautifully, I shall hardly--or rather certainly not--be able to continue as beautifully, while at the time, during the night, I should certainly have succeeded with it. But I must not forsake myself, I am entirely alone.

September 1. In complete helplessness barely wrote two pages.

October 15. Two weeks of good work; full insight into my situation occasionally.

November 1. Yesterday, after a long time, made a great deal of progress; today again virtually nothing; the two weeks since my vacation have been almost a complete loss.

December 19. Yesterday wrote "The Village Schoolmaster" ["The Giant Mole"] almost without knowing it...

January 20. The end of writing. When will it take me up again?

Excerpts from The Diaries of Franz Kafka, Vol. II, 1914-1923

You see? Even Kafka struggled. And you see? Pretty interesting, huh? I bet Sontag's journals are even better.