DIARIES. As someone who has kept journals of one sort or another most of my life, I’m also interested in the diary as a fictional device. Here are a few words about my journaling and notes on two recent novels where diaries are key to the underlying story.
My first diary, which I no longer have, was the size of a paperback book with a bright pink plastic cover and came with a key to lock it. I was probably 11 or 12 when I started writing in this and know that my entries began, “Dear Diary.”
Recently I re-discovered a journal I began when I was seventeen and midway through my senior year in high school. I vowed in it to try and write every day. Early entries record my responses to teachers and classes as well as petty annoyances with friends. I am transcribing this journal as a Word document with the thought that perhaps someday my granddaughters might be interested in reading it. This is in keeping with a larger project of transcribing other journals. I’ve completed our first European trip in 1971 and another one from 1990 when the Chief Penguin was appointed dean of engineering.
DIARIES IN FICTION
The Shape of Mercy by Susan Meissner 
Meissner presents Mercy Hayworth, a teenager in Salem, Massachusetts, who is a victim of the witch trials, to her readers solely through her diary. In the present day, college student Lauren Durough is hired by octogenarian Abigail Boyles to transcribe Mercy’s handwritten diary. Abigail is distantly related to Mercy, hence her interest in having it transcribed. Lauren, from a rich family, is sorting out her own life and worrying over how she judges or, more often, misjudges others’ actions and intentions.
I am not sure why I liked this novel as much as I did. In some ways, the premise that Abigail and Lauren would develop a closeness is an unlikely one and, one might also question why Mercy’s diary has such a dramatic impact on Lauren. The diary itself is well conceived and convincing, however, and I kept on reading to the end. (~JW Farrington)
The Summer Guest by Alison Anderson 
This is a beautiful novel that deserves to be savored like an extended afternoon tea. It unfolds slowly focusing on the diary kept by Zinaida Lintvaryova during the several years Anton Chekhov and his family spent summers in the Ukrainian countryside. Zinaida was a real person, the eldest daughter in her family, and a doctor. She developed a brain illness and began suffering headaches and gradually lost her sight. The Chekhov family did summer in Sumy in the late 1880’s, but the diary is this author’s creation.
In it, Chekhov talks candidly with the now blind Zinaida about the novel he’s working on. Linking the diary to the present are two other women: Katya Kendall, a publisher in London, who sends the Russian manuscript of the diary to an established translator, Ana Harding, based in Switzerland. Katya is desperate to save her business and hopes the diary will do that. Ana, who spent time in the Ukraine in younger days, becomes caught up in Zinaida’s diminished life, her friendship with Anton, and their far ranging conversations about life, literature, and philosophy. For each of these women, Zinaida, Katya, and Ana, the diary prompts a reckoning with her own life—its disappointments and joys, its sorrows and shortcomings.
I was curious about Alison Anderson and aspects of her life show up in Ana. Like Ana, she lives in a Swiss village and is a translator as well as a novelist. Obviously, her work as a translator informs the depiction of what getting works to translate involves. And, since this is yet another historical novel that features a famous author, I found this article in LitHub theorizing why there are so many of these novels of particular interest. It’s by Helen Mcalpin. As you might guess by now, I loved this novel! (~JW Farrington)
STRONG CINEMA & GOLDEN GLOBE WINNER
Three Billboards outside Ebbing Missouri
This is one of the most intense films I’ve seen recently. When Mildred Hayes, angry and grief-stricken that the police have not made any progress on solving the rape and murder of her teenage daughter, rents space on three billboards to publicly question the chief of police, she sets off a powder keg of hate and violence. Fights, fires, and general unpleasantness color everyday interactions.
Frances McDormand is magnificent as the mother. You want to sympathize with her pain and yet can’t condone all of her actions. You feel for her son and her estranged husband and also for Willoughby, the “good old boy” police chief, and eventually even for immature, misguided officer Dickson who exhibits racist tendencies. Definitely worth seeing!
Note: Header photo from www.brandsgifts.ae; other photos by this author.
