Joan Didion Keeping A Private Notebook Summary

Joan Didion's tone in her essay "On Keeping a Notebook," is explanatory and a little sarcastic. She wasn't so much explaining how to keep a notebook as she was explaining why she kept hers the way she did; which made the reader interested in reading it. Didion's sarcasm comes from her explanation.

For the first time in 130 years, more young adults are living with parents until their mid thirties. Part of this could be an emotional attachment keeping them from leaving home because after they leave, everything will change. However, many are losing their real sense of home and are just using it as a place where they can avoid paying bills and many other responsibilities. Many young adults now do not understand the extensive sacrifice it is to leave their one and only home. In “On Going Home,” Joan Didion expounds on her struggle to connect with her current house, in a nostalgic and resigned tone, and vivid imagery, symbolism, and comparison Didion expresses the regret she feels every time she remembers she left her “home”.

There are many aspects for my mind to conceive while reading the articles why I write by George Orwell and Joan Didion. There are many different factors in triggering an author’s imagination to come up with what they want to write, and why they want to write it. In most writings a purpose is not found before the writer writes, but often found after they decide to start writing.

Where I Was From by Joan Didion is a book written about Didion’s perspective of the history of California. Throughout the novel Didion shares her families past experiences and adventures of moving west. Didion not only shows the readers how California has changed but also how it changed her as a person as well. Particularly in “Part One”, the opening paragraph contains an abridgement history of the eventful westward journey of Didion’s pioneer family unit, focusing particularly on the women in the family and tracing vertebral column six generations the blood of her famous hemicranias. Didion makes a very unpersuasive argument in “Part one” by her ineffective use of organization but effective use of grounds and claims.

If she was free to express her feelings, she wouldn’t have had to shove them aside and try to find other things to occupy her mind with. She finds greatest comfort when she writes, but her husband believes that it is bad for her to do so because it is too stimulating. She makes comments many times expressing how writing makes her feel better, that it would “relieve the press of ideas and rest me” (349) and that she “must say

“Writing it down is important to us…recording what we’ve done, in words, on paper, it’s got to be our way of telling ourselves that we mean something, that we matter. That the things we’ve done have made a difference.”

The point of keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. Author, Joan Didion, in her essay, “On Keeping a Notebook” explains how to keep a notebook and why. Didion’s purpose is to inform us on how she keeps a notebook and why notebooks are useful in helping us to remember events that happened in the past. She adopts a sentimental tone in order to emphasize how many memories are kept alive by keeping a notebook. Didion uses ethos, pathos, and different rhetorical devices in her essay to explain her point.

Within the short story “On Morality”, Joan Didion examines and redefines morality in a manner that strays from defining it as a feeling to do right than wrong through the tales of a driver, diver, and widow from Death Valley. Didon attempts to convey to the audience that each individual defines and views mortality differently. She provides a great example of the latter that dumbfounded me, “‘I followed my own conscience.’ ‘I did what I thought was right.’ How many madmen have said it and meant it?” Thus, the matter of what is right and wrong in universal standards does not exist even though, mortality is shared amongst one another.

While it's a rather misleading title, the essay “On Keeping a Notebook” by Joan Didion doesn’t talk about how to keep a notebook, but rather why you should. She expresses her belief that a notebook is: “...something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker (Didion, 87)”. Which, in other words, means a notebook’s contents are information, often small “bits”, that would only make sense, or have meaning, to the person who wrote it.

While reading Joan Didion’s essay “On Going Home” one may be reminded of a sense of home and family. In this essay Didion recreates the feeling one gets when one visits a place from the past or while reminiscing about fond memories. This memory is marked by the reflective thought about the ability to be able to pass this same sense on to another. Didion’s “On Going Home” is like a flood of warm memories leaving you with a single reflective thought.

In the lecture, Tom Hothem presented pictures about his life at the start of the presentation. In the beginning, I didn’t understand the point that he was trying to make. He talked about his favorite diving spots that he discovered while traveling around California. Seeing this I couldn’t necessarily correlate this to the reading. In the reading “Notes from a Native Daughter” by Joan Didion, an important note that Didion made was about how people from the East Coast, after visiting California, thought that they understood what the real California was, but in reality they didn’t, they were barely getting to know what California was really about (Didion). This uncertainty of the relation between the two sources led me on a journey to understand

In Joan Didion’s “Good-Bye to All That”, Didion wrote about a woman’s process of pursuing her dream which was living in New York. Throughout the passage, Didion used many rhetorical devices to establish the storyline, which enhanced the reader’s understanding of the situations. She used many metaphors to represent the reality of the character’s life and what she had hope for. She had also foreshadowed some of the objects in the story that represented something bigger.

What provokes a person to write about his or her life? What motivates us to read it? Moreover, do men and women tell their life story in the same way? The answers may vary depending on the person who answers the questions. However, one may suggest a reader elects to read an autobiography because there is an interest. This interest allows the reader to draw from the narrator's experience and to gain understanding from the experience. When the reader involves him/herself in the experience, the reader encounters what is known and felt by the narrator. The encounter may provide the reader an opportunity to explore a

Journaling, as Burney takes up in her first entry, is an inherently private act. Burney’s attentive writing style and care for specific details, like

The aim of the study was to explore family members’ experiences with the use of a diary when a sick relative did not survive the stay in the ICU. The overall study findings revealed that the diary was experienced as a medium for interpersonal communication, where it was perceived as a social medium maintaining communication and the relationship with the patient. But the diary was also a common interest affecting writers and readers in different ways, thus sharing information, emotions and thoughts enabled relationships, which grew. Not only relationships developed but also participants as humans due to the course of events and finally the death of the patient. The experience was compared to taken on a journey but in an existential way by the participants. To understand the unfamiliar in a way different from the way in which it has been understood so far, also include a way to understand him/herself in a new way (Gadamer, 1989).