A writer’s published diaries tend to occupy the literary shadowlands. Self-revelation mingles with self-deception; shoals of mundanity give way to depths of introspection. In his radiantly anguished journals, American author John Cheever’s “I wake …mount my wife, eat my eggs, walk my dogs” shares the pages with, “In the little skin of light on the water, I saw a bat hunting.” They’re atopiary genre, the emotional and intellectual life pruned to the sensibility a writer wishes to present. Virginia Woolf wanted hers to be “loose knit”, but certainly not “slovenly”. For Susan Sontag, the journal was for self-expression and self-creation. Whatever the artifice, an author’s diary retains an aura of the authentic, tempting one to read it as the final word on that life. “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point,” American journalist Joan Didion instructs herself, and us.
Robert Needham Lord, one of New Zealand’s leading playwrights and the author of more than 20 plays for radio, television and stage, among them Well Hung, Bert & Maisy and Joyful and Triumphant, was also a prolific diarist. His plays reveal him to be at once an astute observer of New Zealand’s suffocating “half-gallon, quarter-acre pavlova paradise” and a subversive pioneer who cultivated aqueer perspective at atime when sex between men was illegal.
Like other self-documentarians, he pondered the genre as he wrote it, wondering,
