Five Teenage Diaries to Read for Those Who Never Kept One

For the fourth installation of Girlhood Studies, columnist Claire Marie Healy reflects on the act of keeping a diary as a teenager as a way of harnessing the unfiltered thoughts and memories of one’s coming-of-age

The fifth season of Girlhood Studies is called Primary Sources. How have notions of adaptation, translation, and the thin line between fiction and memory formed depictions of girlhood? Expect the same studies of film and visual culture, but with a closer look at the texts they draw from.

I never kept a teenage diary. It’s a question I get asked often – it would make sense after all – but I couldn’t take to the form. Call it a byproduct of growing up with the nascent internet, but I was far more likely, in the mid-2000s, to address my anxieties into Sufjan Stevens-dedicated online forums, or project fantasies onto the various photographs of fashion campaigns I collected into a messy hard drive. Among these pieces of evidence of what I was actually like, certain digital ephemera has survived: of the blog I used to write, or screenshots of conversations on MSN Messenger. But what strikes me now, even about these pieces of a former self, is that there was already something public about them.  

Looking back on your own unfiltered thoughts, in any form, is always an exercise in unreality. But because an adolescent diary is intended as a private conversation with the self, there is something especially unsettling about reading a published one. The world-famous example, of course, is Anne Frank’s historical record of living in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, which despite its educational power, has been long-debated in terms of the ethics of what it makes public. No matter their age at the time of writing, the problem with publishing the journal of any figure posthumously is that it hinges on permission that cannot be given.

Much like my own messy archives, many authors have found something more interesting – and I suspect truer to their girlhoods – in the form of fragments than in their verbatim teenage diaries. The magic of these texts occurs in applying a size, shape and structure to the memories of one’s coming-of-age: memories joyful and painful and, somehow, ever-present. It’s in the act of authoring those memories, not just revisiting them, that a more interesting kind of reclamation happens. 

Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood by bell hooks

bell hooks’ intimate account of growing up in the South reconstructs an atmosphere as much as a clear narrative progression. Constructed of memory fragments framed from the perspective of a writer whose politics have already been formed, the recollections of growing up black and female in a patriarchal and racist society are more powerful for the fact the ‘I’ is never stable: she writes of her own memories in the first person, but often switches to observe herself – “the girl” – in the third person, as though from the outside. “Only grown-ups think that the things children say come from nowhere,” hooks writes. “We know they come from the deepest parts of ourselves.”

A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux

A well-thumbed and extremely grubby copy of Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story has been on my desk since it was first translated into English by Alison L Strayer for Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2020. In it, Ernaux investigates a single question: simply, ‘What can I say about this girl?’ Revisiting the year 1958 – when, aged 18, she worked at a Normandy holiday camp for the summer – the story pivots around her memory of a haunting sexual experience and the confusion and self-interrogation it sparks in its aftermath. It is when, as she writes, she ‘started to make a literary being of [herself], someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.’ It captures, from a distance of some 50 years, how connecting with a teenage self can both disorient and free us. A film adaptation, by director Judith Godrèche, premiered at Cannes and has yet to receive a confirmed UK release date; seeing Ernaux on the Croisette with its young stars was like the book’s memoiristic point of view come to life. 

Diary of a Philosophy Student (written 1926–30; published in 2004 and 2006) and Memoirs of A Dutiful Daughter (1958) by Simone de Beauvoir

Taken together, these two books provide a treasure trove into the budding feminist intellectual’s becoming – a coming-of-age both intellectual and emotional. In Diary of a Philosophy Student, consisting of her journal entries from the ages of 19 to 21, familiar struggles of becoming are set down on the page: from intrusive and controlling parents to first loves and loneliness. More particularly, it covers her first meeting with figures like Simone Weil and Jean-Paul Sartre (then Maurice de Gandillac) in real time, as they happened. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, the same time period is considered and expanded upon, as the older de Beauvoir – by now one of France’s most famous intellectuals with The Second Sex (1949) behind her – reflects on the events of her life some three decades later, when her feminist point of view has been well-established.

Reborn: Early Diaries 1947–1963 by Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag’s son, David Rieff, defended his choice to publish the diaries of his mother, including in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963, which covers her formative years and coming-of-age. (Interestingly, and related to my own lack of a diary, he writes that though her diary-keeping remained steady through her life, it was “the computer and e-mail” that delighted her more later on). I love Reborn, though, and am so glad it exists. I’m not sure there’s a better record of teenage intensity in all its painful self-contradiction. I often think of the entry where she writes of coming ‘closer and closer to bursting this poor shell’ and contemplating infinity, shortly followed by another stating how ‘dreary and monotonous’ the previous entry’s scribblings were. ‘Can I never escape this interminable mourning for myself?’ she wails. ‘My whole being seems tense – expectant … ’ (At the time of writing, she was only 15).

If You’re a Girl: Selected Stories 1985-2023 by Ann Rower

If You’re a Girl is very far from a simple republished diary in form and content. But there’s something about the layered process to the publication of the original book of stories by the NY cult figure – first in 1991, in tandem with Cookie Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, and later this expanded edition in 2024 – that speaks directly to the sensation that, as writers, the younger self is always preserved in our writing even as the decades pass. Rower’s writing career has been demarcated by its stops and starts. Aged 53 when her stories were originally collected in this book form, her thrilling, hilarious auto-fictive vignettes had up until then primarily circulated in zines and readings on the poetry and postpunk scenes; when her partner, the writer Heather Lewis, died by suicide in 2002, Rower didn’t pick up a pen for another two decades after that. But the introduction to the 2024 edition, movingly, recounts the writer’s very first love – a girl she met in summer camp aged 14 – and the queer life the discovery of that relationship by her parents delayed, sending her “into the arms of various men [she] was not in love with” for decades to come. The context of Rower’s first transformative romance even leads to the discovery of reams of unseen material that Margot had kept after she died, in 2021 – making the later edition of If You’re a Girl as much a story about recovering an archive of a younger self as it is a collection of wild, downtown tales.