“There has been a lot of suffering on my behalf.”

I had thought my childhood diaries were lost and then my Mom found them!  “I’m sorry I didn’t have time to read them before packing them up and shipping them to you,” she told me.  Mom, that is absolutely okay.  Just so you know, they are pretty much exactly like Susan Sontag’s recently-published diaries, full of glittering insights that presage my intellectual destiny.  Yes, just like Susan Sontag’s diaries, except instead of declarations of fellow-feeling with Andre Gide and Thomas Mann there are all these ornate descriptions of hand jobs.  Also sometimes POETRY (GOD!), and also I’m always talking about how I’m “desperately unhappy” or “sooo bored.”

But there are some interesting and funny parts and I feel obligated to my teenage self, who so clearly intended these musings for an audience — per wannabe-coy 8th grade me, “Who am I writing this for? For me? Well, yes, primarily. But others? I don’t think so. Perhaps” — to share some highlights.  “You’re going to post about this, aren’t you,” my friend Lori said when I told her the diaries were due to arrive in the mail today.  Well, yeah.  I am still the person who wrote those diaries, after all.

3rd grade Emily is revealed to be pretty much just a bad person:

“Today my Brother Ben broke his leg …. there has been a lot of suffering on my behalf. Ben got tons of presents and no one knows I exist. I am just thought of as the person who gets blamed for everything Ben does.”

This particular diary also had spaces for the diarist to answer questions and fill in blanks.  This is what 3rd grade Emily “liked about herself:”  “My nose, my hair, I am good at spelling and reading.”  She doesn’t like: “I am not good in math and sometimes I think people think I am weird.” I wonder why.

Like Susan Sontag, the young diarist finds her identity reshaped by expatriation.  In lil’ Emily’s case, it was a three-week 8th-grade field trip to France that lent her musings a new level of profundity: “What has Paris done to me?  I feel like all rules have been repealed, even those I’ve made for myself.”   Also: “Observation: electrical outlets are different here.”

Oh, poor little Emily! I’m being mean, and I can almost feel her vain, funny, pretentious, insecure, intensely boy-crazy little ghost in the room with me right now, and she doesn’t deserve meanness.  Little Emily!  What precedent made you feel you had to fill eight volumes with stories about your crushes, your reading habits, your shopping trips, your favorite song lyrics, your grades,  your crushes, your crushes, your crushes?  Is this Anne Frank’s fault?

Ok, enough commentary.  These are all early-high-school Emily:

“It should be easy to write a novel, maybe I will over the summer. Anything I write before I’m 20 will be autobiographical, whether I intend it to be so or not.”

“I don’t really like people who talk like the backs of No Fear t-shirts.”

[On virginity]“You should save something for the rest of your life and not grow up too fast, right?”

“They didn’t even kiss!  I drew the inevitable comparison to Pretty Woman and said that Bennett was prostituting himself.  Sort of.  Well, he enjoyed it … I will of course love him no matter what he does, but how very horrible.”

“I feel so angst-ridden right now.”

“When I get old, I want to be like my [maternal] grandparents. They take us canoeing and point out various types of wildlife and fish. [My paternal grandparents] can identify two species of fish, probably: lox and whitefish salad.”

“Okay, it’s 4:30 now, I’ve written 6 pages, which is at the same time sad, scary, frustrating and infuriating. But objectively I’ve gotta say that it was pretty good.”

“The weirdest part of the whole thing is that then it seemed so horrendous and important, but once pain is over you can’t remember how it felt.” [This was about a jellyfish sting].

“It is the sex year. Oh grody.”

“And she does coke which strikes me as soooo ’80s.”

“Today I went whitewater canoeing and attended a school board subcommittee on sex education.  The canoeing was much more fun but probably not as socially relevant.”

“He denied it with all the fervor of an overcooked egg noodle.”

“Sheesh, Season and I have kissed in front of my homecoming date, then my mother.  Who’s next, Newt Gingrich?”

“God, do you realize how BIG this is? And how few people I’ve told.”

“They get cancer and they think they’re special all of a sudden.”

“In the violently anti-romantic bunk bed, shirts off, we were a little calmer.”

“I haven’t had a functional relationship since nursery school! I’ve just given up hope.”

16 comments to “There has been a lot of suffering on my behalf.”

  • I can’t decide if I’m amused or depressed by the fact that the phrase, “I haven’t had a functional relationship since nursery school! I’ve just given up hope,” rang so true for me that I laughed out loud. Probably the former, which is good. (?)

  • your diary’s memory conflicts strongly with my own…

  • Lori

    This is amazing!! Lox and whitefish salad being one of my favorite of course.

  • Luke

    “They get cancer and they think they’re special all of a sudden.”

    Dude, I think/write this every day!

  • I don’t think I’m even that precocious now…

  • very funny. I’m very thankful I didn’t start keeping a journal until college.

  • Rebecca A.

    This is wonderful stuff! MORE MORE MORE!!!

  • wes

    “I haven’t had a functional relationship since nursery school! I’ve just given up hope.”

    Is this still true, Emily?

  • it sounds like you need to get Mortified.

    Have you heard of it? People read excerpts from their actual childhood diaries. It’s absolutely hilarious, embarassing and somewhat heartwarming. You’re the perfect candidate.

  • kt

    All young girls’ journals can be blamed on Anne Frank and Harriet the Spy. Bravo! This was delightful reading.

  • Tim

    Any other revealing gems of teenage wisdom such as:

    “Step one of not being a social outcast is: avoid befriending social outcasts.”

    “Today, I am grumpier than one of those barking old dudes that my dad insists on watching on CNN.”

    “The all-knowing mirror reveals, er, all.”

    “Geriatric displays of affection at the breakfast table: I may well be put off cereal for life.”

    “Call me paranoid, but I’ve seen enough horror movies (well, enough horror movie footage) to know that sneaking off alone with the mysterious bad boy is usually something the expendable third lead does.”

    “Wow, every teen movie ever made is right: high school jocks really are complete dirtbags.”

  • heather-m

    In my early-1990s British childhood, there was ‘Zlata’s Diary’, a kind of new Anne Frank, from Bosnia, except unlike Anne she both survived and was a star in her own time, appearing on ‘Newsround’, the kids-TV news programme for precocious liberal-middle-class children. The amount of diary entries I have around the age of 12 that start, like, ‘this is just like when Zlata’s house got bombed!’ is kind of really not funny. Or very. Your diary entries – and commentary – are hilarious, but mine still put me to shame waaay more.

  • adiemus 6

    Emily- you may want to contact Barnes & Noble and make sure they are stocking Hex Education. They did not have it at the Union Square B&N nor was it in stock at an upstate store. At both locations they said they would have to order it. The Strand didn’t have it either. I think you and Zareen are missing out on some serious royalty $$ because of this.

  • emily

    adiemus 6: sadly Hex Ed is long remaindered! Thank you for caring though.

  • Tim

    @ Heather M- Aleksandar Hemon also writes very vividly about the Yugoslavian Civil War and the Bosnian refugee experience in Nowhere Man. In one scene a horse commits suicide by jumping off a cliff. I didn’t know animals were capable of becoming depressed enough to kill themselves. I guess only in Bosnia, right?

    But, yes, comparisons between the bloody carnage and deracination of war and the alienated and awkward struggles of adolescence often don’t prove anything except that the diarist has an overarching imagination.

  • i want more!

    “the canoeing was much more fun but probably not as socially relevant.”

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