Joan Didion On Keeping A Notebook Summary

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A notebook is a creation that only its creator can understand. Multi-Genre writer, Joan Didion, in her essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” writes to inform the reader of what keeping a notebook has done to her life. Didion begins her essay by explaining how keeping a notebook has impacted her life, permitting her to express her feelings, and assuming herself with her entertaining accounts, however, because she uses so much imagination and bias in her writing, only she can unravel what she’s written. In her essay, Didion describes how keeping a notebook has permitted her to express her feelings. “I write entirely to find out what’s on my mind, what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I’m seeing and what it means, what I want and what I’m afraid…show more content…
The text states, “…with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts (paragraph 7).” The author feels as writing her feelings down instead of complaining about it, gave her a sense of amusement. It gave her the chance to express those thoughts into something hilarious. When she went back to read what she had written as a five year-old, she had no idea of what she was thinking back then, but she could definitely point out that she was amusing herself with those thoughts back then. It led her to realize why she is the way she is as an adult. It transformed her life, being capable of writing these thoughts down with her broad imagination. Writing in the notebook has taken away from the boredom in her life. When she feels like she’s going through the motions of life, she’ll pull out her notebook to reflect on her past and it allows her to remember who she was then and is now. “I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write—…, paid passage back to the world out there (paragraph 10).” This refers to how every now and then she’ll get bored of life; however, reading her notebook gives her amusement that authorizes her escape from the world

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