Reading Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature, I couldn’t help but draw on my own experience as an avid adolescent reader during the time period Day focuses on. I read many of the books Day discusses as a preteen and teen and a lot of what she said about how these books allow for identification and intimacy rings true.
Particularly after reading her chapter on diaries, I was reminded of my own interactive journals that many of my other female friends also had. I wrote in a diary as an early middle schooler that was actually more of a fill-in-the blank book. From what I recall, each section was centered around a different theme: friendships, embarrassing moments, dreams, etc. I remember that there were lists you needed to fill in of your top-ten best friends, or worst enemies, for example. I have been searching for this diary on the internet and I can’t find it! (It had a moon on the cover and a lock.) But it seems similar to these ones:
These books share a lot of the aspects of the fictional works Day describes. Like “intimate” YA novels, the notebooks imply a preoccupation with disclosure and secrecy, but they do so through including a physical lock or mirroring the style of an innocent composition book. The journals also imply that the diary is a feminine form, through their stereotypically girly imagery like flowers and butterflies—catering to a particular type of implied adolescent girl audience.
What’s interesting about these types of books is, like the fictional diaries or other “intimate narratives” Day describes, they also create an assumed audience—but in the case, the audience member is both reader and writer. These books are physically interactive—they envision the participation of an implied reader, but also help create an actual writer.
As a teen, I remember being inspired to keep a diary after reading books like The Princess Diaries and would even mimic some of Mia’s language in my own writing. So while writing in these interactive journals, I was also informed by fictional representations of diaries. In a way, then, we can see diary fiction as literacy narratives: works that portray the writing process or the development of a writerly figures. Diaries—both fictional and interactive—can thus serve as writing tools, as well as a form to explore the nature of intimacy and discourse.
