Rapazes & raparigas

A young girl is presented with a lockable diary on Christmas; she addresses it as “Dear Diary” or even by a particular name: Anne Frank's diary was her “Dear Kitty.” Millions of such diaries survive in shoeboxes along with elementary school autograph books; millions of others have perished in late adolescent Kinderdammerungs. Oh, my God, how could I have written this? the seventeen-year-old cries, and off into the wastebasket goes her book. Twenty years later, when shame over youth's inanities has been utterly overpowered by the simple desire to have back youth itself, she wishes she had kept it.

The generic he gives way to she in these paragraphs, because the secret-keeping adolescent diary is, or certainly has been, pre-eminently a female genre. We are still not likely to give boys diaries at Christmas. Later on, when they're suitably professional and significant, they can start them; then they will be important "records." But to write in one's ‘secret friend’ on all the ordinary days of childhood is not seemly for a boy: inner lives are for little girls; baseball is for their brothers. A subtle, even unconscious, indoctrination has probably always been going on in the presentation of these diaries to girls (those with locks still sold in the five-and-ten never carry a boy's picture on them; it's always a girl's). The little girl is being trained to appreciate dailiness, and ordinariness: her lot in life is the quotidian; her brother will do whatever transcending there is to be done.

But the bright little girl soon enough recognizes that the cultivated inner life can be a much more powerful and dangerous weapon with which to repel intruders than any baseball bat. It may be in her diary that she discovers how to keep part of herself back, and to take revenge on those who have wounded what part of her has been exposed. She learns things about herself faster than her brother, and when he tries to read her diary — and of course he will — it will not be just to torment her with the news that he's done so, and not just out of animal curiosity, but also because he's jealous. No one likes anything to be kept from him; and certainly no one likes to be talked about without the chance to reply.

Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries.