Secret Notebooks

"Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of lost things...children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss to come."

~Joan Didion~

My first full notebook was one I started at the age of ten. It was a Christmas present with gilded-pages, an embossed title: "My Year" and a small lock that could be picked with the edge of a dime. Each day was neatly contained by date in a small square with lines to record the sequence of daily life. January approached and I was eager to start the journal, but instead, I immediately censored myself afraid I would get in trouble for writing that it was New Year's Eve and my mother took my younger brother and I to a late movie because she "hated the holiday with its false hope". The three of us sat in the empty theatre, listening to the sounds of muffled fireworks booming outside as the year turned and the images onscreen saturated with their eerie light. It was one of the first nights I noticed that my father didn't come home at all.

I scribbled instead: "Movies with Mom and Dave. Came home with a headache." The year was just hours old and already I could sense the ways things were about to begin to unravel...like Didion's quote above, I was a child afflicted with a presentiment of loss to come. Some rough things had already happened, of course...my parents' initial volatile fights, my father's strong brand of physical discipline, a pregnancy my mother lost in the fifth month that my brother and I whispered about in his bunk bed after dark. But this, I somehow knew, was only the beginning. I worried, fretted, stared out my bedroom window at the streets when I should have been sleeping, then covered the notebook pages with curt phrases, subtle omissions and outright lies about what I wished my day had been.

I didn't write anything remotely like the truth...I just couldn't.

Also true, but off-limits to really sink in and write about? Twenty-two years ago on this day, my older brother died. He went out with friends to celebrate at a back-to-school bash and drank himself to death in an apartment off campus. He was a few days shy of his twentieth birthday and had uncharacteristically kissed me goodbye as I watched him leave the night before, calling me Betty like he always did and saying, "Be good." I think, in more ways than I can explain in just a few lines, I spent the next two decades trying to do just that. I never quite managed and was never quite able to shake the feeling that somehow Fate had messed up and the wrong child in our family had died. He was my father's namesake...the son to carry on the family line. He was closer to my mother than any of the rest of us were. My sister was beautiful, brilliant, a gifted athlete and firstborn. My little brother was the baby...adorable, charming, funny and affectionate. Then, there was me...second girl, third child, second youngest--the one without a clear role and the one prone to fits of melancholy and a need for space that did not mesh well with a large Irish-Catholic family.

In a household that valued discipline, mathematics, logic, academics, athletics and productivity, my scattered, dreamy, clumsy, secretive self felt very outside from a very young age. I was the only average student of the bunch...in part, no doubt, because in every single notebook from those years, I would write stories, sketches and poems instead of paying attention. I snuck toys into my desk...my favorite, a set of nesting matryoshka dolls, I played with secretly while the rest of the class worked. I was fascinated by the painted girls all embedded inside one another, layer upon layer of beauty and possibility. My parents asked, with increasing intensity year after year, why I "just couldn't be more like my sister." Though my parents loved me and would have completely reassured me that it was untrue if I'd ever dared to tell them I "should have been the one who died," it makes sense to me that I believed I'd somehow accidentally cheated Death. Given my tentative position in the family, I understand why I was always so afraid of never living up to the borrowed time I thought my brother's death had somehow bought for me.

Last year, I started writing in a series of secret notebooks. I surrounded myself with them...tucked in my desk at work, my bedroom, my car, on the side table by the couch. I bought notebooks with paper recycled from phone books, Chinese menus, jagged-edged maps, graph paper, art paper, pages harvested from old novels. I didn't tell anyone I was writing non-fiction ...not even my writing group. I didn't even confess to myself that I was writing anything that could be formed into one manuscript, instead I considered these "sketches" or "vignettes." It was the first time I'd dared to write, nakedly and without hesitation, the truth about what has happened in my life. At times, the writing has left me strung out and half-deranged, like I've been holding a razor blade and not a pen in my hand. Other times, it has been all sepia and sweetness...an acknowledgement of how beautiful things are, even in their brokenness.

I wrote in all of the separate notebooks at once...never re-reading, the only rule in place for myself was that once I started writing a scene I'd keep going until it was finished in one shot. Otherwise, I knew, I'd stop the second my skin hit the knife's edge of truth and drew blood. I started typing them up randomly, in a file saved under the working title from the lines of a Neruda poem. Today, I finally admitted to myself that these 197 pages (thus far) might just be a manuscript. The story has started right around when that first journal of mine did...only this time, I'm not writing in blunted half-truths. Right now, it skips around from my father to my brother to others who have left their fingerprints or their bruises on my heart. But, ultimately, it isn't a manuscript about men, but what it is to be me...nothing more ambitious than one person telling the truth. I had to scatter my stories into their various notebooks, like a matryoshka has to split herself into different pieces, different narratives, just to exist. The odds of me ever sharing this work with anyone else are slim to none, but this process of writing has started to give me some faint glimmers of awareness. In my life, it seems clear to me now, it is enough that I am here to be a witness. I am here to tell the story.