A diary with no drawings of me in it? Where are the torrid fantasies? The romance novel covers? The-

My Drawings expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon ... I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands ... I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse blanket ... I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit being examined for military duty. I also wrote poetry.

For someone like me, it is a very strange habit to write in a diary. Not only that I have never written before, but it strikes me that later neither I, nor anyone else, will care for the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year old schoolgirl. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I feel like writing, and I have an even greater need to get all kinds of things off my chest.

We live in such isolation, and here I am again with my silent friend, my diary.

Reiko had not kept a diary and was now denied the pleasure of assiduously rereading her record of the happiness of the past few months and consigning each page to the fire as she did so.

- Death in Midsummer and Other Stories

A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.

I will keep for you the small drawings that I usually make beforehand. They don't have any artistic value. I just make them to have some grip for the composition of the print..

In my early teens, skinny ribs daily rent asunder by the explosive emotions within - oh golly gosh how I hate that spotty, mingy Mildred and will Rock Hudson ever ever clasp me in his steely arms - I burst upon a diary with a great gold lock.
But the Moroccan leather binding, the milky expanse within, instantly transformed me into Baroness Munchausen. My very handwriting spiked into the serious trembly copperplate I deemed more suitable for the consumptive heroine I wished to be than the thick round letters of the large schoolgirl I was (if experts today are right and handwriting shapes the fortunes of the writer, I should have died elegantly at the end of the diary). Even the contents were bastard - I found it beneath my dignity to write of anything but the most searing Brontë-esque passions and now, far from being a record of day-to-day events, each entry requires a simultaneous translation: "Today I think I shall go mad, I shiver, I groan, I sob" (Myron Fickelburger didn’t sit next to me in Chemistry); "Wild gales sweep across the moors, I run and howl, my eyes stream tears" (it’s windy in the playground and I’ve got this bit of asphalt in my eye). Discovered long hence, that diary would provide historians with a vivid and haunting picture of youthful stress in the fifties - vivid and haunting and deeply untrue.

First of all, it is a fact that this is just a comic book, not a personal diary. A diary records and displays a person's growth and changes in life, whereas a comic book is just a recreational reading material, and also the characters are merely fictional.

I began keeping diaries after they locked Rosemary up at Butler and I went to live with Aunt Elaine in Cranston until I was eighteen, but even the diaries can't be trusted. For instance, there's a series of entries describing a trip to New Brunswick that I'm pretty sure I never took. It used to scare me, those recollections of things that never took place, but I've gotten used to it.

“Never fancied him anyway,” I’d write when a boy dumped me. I’d leave out things that had gone wrong, or been difficult. I think it was partly an exercise in defiance, a refusal to be defeated by life’s adversities. So in that sense, my diary was a bit of a self-help manual, written by me, for me.

I have no imagination. I never plan a drawing, they just happen.

The reason for my starting a diary is that I have no real friend.