Published in 2010 (first published 1997)
288 pages
Alexandra Johnson is the author of Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal and The Hidden Writer, for which she won a PEN award. She was a Harvard University instructor in creative writing from 1990 to 1998. She began a writing career in 1982. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, and The Nation, among other national publications. She teaches memoir at Wellesley College and the Harvard Extension School, where she won the James E. Conroy Award for distinguished teaching of writing.
Johnson once stated: “I was born in San Francisco into a family of hidden writers, three generations of diarists. My grandmother kept a detailed diary recording her work for the Red Cross in Siberia during World War I. My mother hid her own diaries and stories in the linen closet. My aunt, a teacher of film, kept extensive diaries and wrote novels while raising three children.” Such a tradition influenced her career as an author. Her book, Leaving a Trace, 2001, is a practical guide to keeping a journal successfully & transforming it into future projects.
What is this book about?
“Whom do I tell when I tell a blank page?” Virginia Woolf’s question is one that generations of readers and writers searching to map a creative life have asked of their own diaries. No other document quite compares with the intimacies and yearnings, the confessions and desires, revealed in the pages of a diary. Presenting seven portraits of literary and creative lives, Alexandra Johnson illuminates the secret world of writers and their diaries, and shows how over generations these writers have used the diary to solve a common set of creative and life questions.
In Sonya Tolstoy’s diary, we witness the conflict between love and vocation; in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf’s friendship, the nettle of rivalry among writing equals is revealed; and in
Alice James’s diary, begun at age forty, the feelings of competition within a creative family are explored.
The Hidden Writer shows how the diaries of Marjory Fleming, Sonya Tolstoy, Alice James, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin, and May Sarton negotiated the obstacle course of silence, ambition, envy, and fame. Destined to become a classic on writing and the diary as literary form, this is an essential book for anyone interested in the evolution of creative life.
