Last year, my mother donated boxes upon boxes of books from our big old house to a neighborhood book sale. A few days later, she got a call from the organizers to come pick something up. It was a 1936 edition of The Adventures of Peter Cottontail that someone, her daughter presumably, had adapted into a diary.
The entries, dated November 19, 1999 and November 21, 1999, are full of photographs and fading ink; I kept having to change writing instruments. This was typical: the pens in my family home never seemed to work and I could never keep a diary up. I don’t know what compelled me to start and end one on this particular weekend in 1999 (the 19th was a Friday, the 21st, a Sunday—I looked it up). I vaguely remember making it, and more acutely: I remember being embarrassed by it after, and abandoning it. I hated my own voice. I wanted to inhabit different people.
Two months earlier, I’d celebrated my twelfth birthday with a party in a park where I got everyone to drink Mike’s Hard Lemonade, an incident I’d completely forgotten about until the only person from junior high who I’m still in contact with (she appears in this diary) reminded me of it recently, saying, you gave everyone their first drink. I remember stealing these dusty bottles from the basement stairs, having thought about doing it all week; I wanted to stage a provocative scene, to bring some California (TV) badness to goodie goodie Ottawa. Of the scene itself, in my memory, it’s all green. All I can see is the vivid green brush we must’ve been crouched in as the vodka lemonade was passed around.
Fifteen years later, someone else who appears in this diary DM’ed me with a request that I never post her image or mention her by name in anything I’m doing. She’s a lawyer now.
I would have cringed to have found this diary back then, in 2014. I was still ashamed of my urge to write and what came out when I did. The equivocation, the unhealthy obsession with my friends, the comp het, the self-deception (almost everything I wrote is the opposite of what I really felt), the anxiety of being a late bloomer, advocating for others as a way to stand up for myself, revealing the “real” as a way to get even, and accidentally being very, very funny, but only accidentally, all in penmanship that looks like Kathy Acker’s—the Secret Journal is prequel to my little novel Exquisite Mariposa (2019). I’m even in there, posing as an amoeba, a caterpillar.
Fiona Alison Duncan is a writer and organizer.
