A Pocket-Size Time Machine
Between the two of us, my father and I have more than 50 diaries. Mine are a wealth of embarrassments: elementary-school poems that rhyme first base with corn flakes, a photo of an ex–best friend with the edges burned in some teenage rage, gushing during college about first love and infidelity, and more recently, a list of baby names that I’m relieved were never chosen. (Was I really considering Amapola?) My father’s diaries, which date back to the 1960s, are a mash-up of half-finished watercolors, to-do lists, and reflections on addiction. As humiliating and incoherent as most of these diaries are, I cannot part with them. And so they sit there, stacked in banker’s boxes in my childhood attic, collecting dust and rat poop.
My diary collection is dwarfed by Sally MacNamara Ivey’s. She has read more than 10,000 unpublished diaries and spent 35 years collecting them. She keeps nearly 1,000 in her Washington State home. With her blue-rimmed librarian glasses and wavy golden hair, she’s part archivist and part romantic, on a mission to sort, catalog, and find a forever home for all of her diaries. They’re tucked away in plastic bins in each of her closets, stacked on nightstands, and stored securely in six-foot-tall, 1,000-pound safes in her garage. “If someone robs
