Notes from Kathleen Collins’s Diary
When the writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins died in 1988 at age forty-six, her level of fame was disproportionate to the heights of her talent. With a singing, singular voice, she wrote stories of black women in and out of love. The release in 2016 of Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? introduced her pioneering work to twenty-first-century readers. Now, Ecco has released Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary, a delightful grab bag of Collins’s letters, plays, film scripts, journal entries, stories, and chapters of an unfinished novel. Below, Collins revisits her diary and reflects on the nature of writing, loving, and living.
Kathleen Collins. Photo: Douglas Collins.
November 19
It rained hard today. After lunch I sat in the kitchen sipping a can of beer. The beer made me very sleepy, so I came in to take a nap. It was one of those deep naps, where the wind and the rain conspire to take you into a deep, secure slumber. Every muscle goes limp. You awaken, as you awaken sometimes after really good lovemaking: spent, but incredibly rested and content.
February 8
Riding in the car, the day was suddenly dreary, bleak. And life seemed monotonous and sad. I wanted to cry. It seems that I have watched enough winters come in, turned the clocks back enough times, watched the rain turn the world black too many days. Only my children really hold me to life. They give me the patience to wait it out for a new day.
On my desk sits a photograph taken in the ’30s of several young women gathered for some festive occasion.
