When I was nine, I wanted to be Harriet the Spy. I stalked my neighbors with the same misplaced confidence Harriet brought to her rounds on the Upper East Side, clutching a Mead composition book and scribbling down whether Mrs. Pine smoked in the house (she did) and if the mailman liked cats (he didn’t). I told myself I was practicing observation and discipline, preparing myself for the writer’s life, or whatever my understanding was of it at the time.
I didn’t yet understand that this was the central act of writing, especially for girls. That the journal—often dismissed as “just a diary”—wasn’t merely a space for confessional wallowing, but a scaffolding for becoming, a place to contain a life in progress. I didn’t know that this habit I began in childhood—one that I’ve continued through adolescence, motherhood, grief, addiction, and recovery—was part of a lineage. To journal is to claim authority over your own interiority. It is to say: I saw and felt these things. I was here.
To journal is to claim authority over your own interiority. It is to say: I saw and felt these things. I was here.
Lately, it feels like the world has finally caught up to the journal girl. There’s a resurgence of interest in diaries and notebooks as both literary practice and cultural force, particularly among women, queer writers, and others who’ve long been dismissed as “too personal.” There is also a distinct shift from the oversharing of the early-2010s blogosphere toward something more distilled: emotional depth endures, but it’s no longer being performed. It arrives gently, having been lived through first.
Originally launched as a pandemic-era online project, “The Isolation Journals” is one such example. It began as a daily journaling initiative created by Suleika Jaouad to help people find meaning through writing during uncertain times and has since grown into a creative community of more than a quarter of a million people. In the spring of 2025, the project expanded into print with The Book of Alchemy, a hybrid of memoir and creative prompts that weaves together Jaouad’s reflections on journaling and creativity with contributions from the vibrant community she helped cultivate.
Journals offer different portraits of the creative self depending on how (and why) they’re made public. Some, like Jaouad’s, emerge accidentally or posthumously, revealing a rawness the writer never intended to share.
Joan Didion’s Notes to John, published posthumously, is of the latter variety. The book pulls from her private notebooks where she recorded detailed conversations with her psychiatrist. It gives us a Didion voice stripped of its signature detachment—unguarded, repetitive, almost childlike in its grief as she describes difficulties with her daughter and struggles around her work.
In yet another iteration, Kelly McMasters’ Substack series, Show Me Your Diary, creates a living, intentional conversation about the role of diaries in creative life. Each installment invites a writer to reflect on their personal journaling habits and history through a set of thoughtful questions, paired with photographs of their actual notebooks. The series showcases journals as windows into the mess and method of each writer’s mind, revealing an unfiltered backdrop to their creative world.
Even pop culture has caught the scent. Chappell Roan, following both her VMA and Grammy wins, read her acceptance speeches from her diary, indicating that she’d written them ahead of time—just in case. It felt historic to watch her place her Grammy on the floor so she could hold her butter-yellow notebook with both hands. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the journal girl ethos: hope, ambition, and an almost ceremonial belief in the power of the page.
This sensibility is reverberating in music as well, where intimacy and raw vulnerability are making a quieter, more interior return. Take Sophie Hunter—a rising artist whose lo-fi, lyrically driven pop evokes the texture of diary entries. Her songs ache with lines that feel written first for herself, only later offered to an audience.
What’s remarkable about this moment is not just that people are journaling, but the journal is moving beyond its traditional role as a warm-up for “real” writing or a quirky affectation. It’s finally getting the spotlight as a site of art and inquiry unto itself. Notebooks are being published with less polish, less shame. Readers seem hungry for texture, and for the granular mess of a consciousness unfolding in real time.
This shift didn’t happen in a vacuum. It comes at a time when self-expression has been flattened into brand. On social media, every caption, image, and story carries the pressure to be aesthetic, monetized, and shareable. We’re encouraged to perform authenticity rather than live it. Amidst all this algorithmic overexposure, the journal offers something quietly subversive: privacy. And paradoxically, that privacy is what makes it feel more honest—and more valuable—when shared.
Amidst all this algorithmic overexposure, the journal offers something quietly subversive: privacy.
I recently participated in a journaling workshop led by Amy Shearn through the Writing Co-Lab. Each week as a group we read excerpts of the diaries of other writers, not for their prose, but for their patterns. We delved into selections from the notebooks of Virginia Woolf, Annie Ernaux, Clarice Lispector, Susan Sontag, and Octavia Butler. We read them not as drafts but as documents of self-construction. Woolf tracked her daily rhythms with obsessive precision, toggling between household minutiae and metaphysical despair. Ernaux wrote in bursts, urgently trying to pin time to the page. Butler filled her notebooks with affirmations and imperatives: “I write bestselling novels. My books will be read by millions of people! So be it! See to it!”
The magic isn’t in the polish of these writers’ journaling, but in the persistence. Each writer, in her way, was narrating herself into being.
Of course, there is a long tradition of belittling this kind of narration. The journal girl has always been culturally suspect. She’s been framed as too sensitive, too self-absorbed, too inconsistent. Her subject—herself—considered too boring, too indulgent, too much. We’ve long internalized the idea that the personal is frivolous unless made universal, and even then, only if filtered through irony or male detachment. But what happens when we refuse to filter? What if we take the journal girl seriously?
Didion wrote with surgical detachment in her famously reserved essays. But in the 46 diary entries that comprise Notes to John, each of which are addressed to her husband after his sudden death, her voice frays. “I sat down and immediately began to cry,” she writes. “‘What’s on your mind,’ Dr. MacKinnon asked. I said I didn’t know. I rarely cried. In fact I never cried in crises. I just found it very difficult to sit down facing somebody and talk.” This is not just recording. It’s raw admittance. The journal, here, is not a mere routine, it’s a refuge.
When my daughter was diagnosed with leukemia, I didn’t begin processing the trauma by writing an essay. In the early days of her treatment, I wrote in my journal. I catalogued medications, smells, beeping machines, nurses I liked, nurses I suspected were judging me. I wrote about how my daughter’s face changed shape during pulses of steroids, and about the baby in the room next door whose parents I never saw. I wasn’t trying to be profound—my notebook was a place to pour out what I didn’t know how to speak aloud. It was a place without an audience, without polish, and most importantly, without the pressure to be fine.
As I’ve been working on a book about our cancer years, I’ve gone back and read those early entries spread across physical journals and, as we spent more time in the hospital, my phone’s notes app. The writings are disjointed, repetitive, ugly in places—fragmented lists, pages blotched with tears—but they hold a feral truth I couldn’t fake. They don’t just remind me of what happened—they reveal what I didn’t then understand. I can trace the path of my thinking during that crisis, peek through the window into that past version of myself. That’s the other function of the journal: it doesn’t just record your thoughts; it gives them room to form.
Of course, there’s risk in opening that private space to others. Publishing a journal, or even quoting from one, means forfeiting some of its power. Vulnerability becomes commodity. You’re no longer writing in the dark, you’re curating. McMasters touches on this through her interview series. By asking writers to share their diaries, she is also asking them to decide what gets left in and what gets cut in the curation of their most private thoughts. These are especially sharp questions for women, who’ve long been expected to share their pain (and just as often punished for it.) We valorize the brave confessor until her honesty becomes inconvenient.
There’s power, too, in reclaiming the journal as literature—not as spectacle, but as form. In a 2021 interview with NPR, Suleika Jaouad shared, “Journaling became the place that I was able to find a sense of narrative control at a time when I had to cede so much control to others. It became the place where I began to interrogate my predicament and to try to excavate some meaning from it.” What would it mean to believe in the journal as the work, and by extension, to value a woman’s private record as much as her polished prose?
What would it mean to value a woman’s private record as much as her polished prose?
Substack has become a sort of public diary, a digital throwback to the messy vitality of LiveJournal and Tumblr. Writers post dispatches that read like letters, lists, fragments. There’s an appetite for first-person writing that doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, something between the tweet and the essay—something more raw and alive.
At the same time, younger creators are rejecting the pressure for constant polish. On TikTok and YouTube, lo-fi video diaries abound. You’ll find soft-spoken narrations, overhead shots of annotated pages, and girls whispering aloud lines they’ve just written. A new visual grammar of the diary is forming—one that prizes immediacy over perfection. The journal girl, once derided, is now an aesthetic. You can buy pre-distressed notebooks and faux-vintage pens. There are entire YouTube channels dedicated to bullet journaling, “aesthetic routines,” and stationery hauls. This commodification is both frustrating and fascinating. On the one hand, it risks flattening something deeply personal into a lifestyle accessory. On the other, it’s a sign that something about the journal girl—her mess, her earnestness—has struck a nerve.
Maybe it’s because she offers an alternative to the endless performance of the internet. Maybe it’s because she reminds us that we’re allowed to write things we’ll never publish. Maybe it’s because she believes, so radically, that her life is worth documenting.
I see this in my own daughter, now 13. She keeps a blue-covered journal in the drawer of her nightstand, the metal spiral of its binding stretched and unraveling. When I go into her room to say goodnight, I often find her propped against her headboard, her face a mask of concentration. I feel the ache of recognition, and I wonder what she’s discovering in those pages—what truths she’s unearthing about herself, what small wounds she’s tending. I imagine she’s building a map of her inner world, one line at a time. In a world that will expect her to perform or edit herself into palatability, I hope her journal is a place where she can be whole.
When I look back at the journals I kept as a girl, I’m struck by how little I held back. There’s something embarrassing about the openness, but also enviable. I hadn’t yet learned to second-guess every sentence. I wrote because I wanted to understand something, not because I wanted to be understood. That’s what I see in the journals of Didion, Woolf, Butler. Their journals are not just the seeds of books to come, but whole selves in process: the page as confidante, as experiment, and as mirror.
In the end, the journal isn’t a practice in narcissism, but a practice in attention. To keep a diary is to say: I am paying attention to my life, and I believe that it matters. That might be the most radical act of all.
