On a trip to Vancouver last spring, I found my childhood diary in my parents' crawlspace. As a writer, I have many, many diaries but this one is special because unlike my school journals which were read by my teachers, this was my first private diary, complete with a lock. It also had Garfield on the cover, which made it extra cool. I wrote in this notebook when I was ten, spanning grade four and five. Re-reading this diary was outrageously funny. I had some very strong feelings at that age. I despised my siblings, thought my parents horribly unfair, passionately loved a boy, and was disgusted with some of my classmates. I proclaimed all of this with lots of exclamation marks and a solid command of the profanities I'd learned at summer camp. For weeks I entertained (and shocked) my husband and boys with such gems as: "Marcy is a fuck-face" and "I wish Jeffrey was never born." (Apologies to my siblings; I certainly don't feel that way now.) My husband told me that reading your teenage or childhood diary in public is now a thing, a cult live show called Mortified: Share the Shame. It's like Dear Teen Me, but without the earnestness. It's unbelievably funny.
Although the boys asked for me to read them more of my literary debut, I kept most of it to myself. I still know (at least in a Facebook sense) the boy I loved in grade four and I still have his picture in a box in my basement. Somehow these feelings still feel too fresh to me, even thirty years on.
I did share with my boys one page with the words I WANT TO BE A WRITER scrawled in giant bubble letters, but then kept to myself the smaller font message: "but I don't know how," on the next page. This also felt too personal, and something I'm still grappling with. I could have wrote this yesterday, this going back and forth between literary dreams and the literary reality of the blank page.
My children were also impressed by how mean I was about my some of my classmates. "You're like Harriet the Spy, but worse," my older son proclaimed. This made me laugh. We were reading Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet at the time, and my boys were both shocked that Harriet would write such mean things about her friends, and then mortified that her diary was found. I mean mortified to the point where they had their fingers in their ears and were begging me to stop reading. I had to skip several pages until, as my younger son described, "Harriet became nice again." Perhaps this was the first book I'd read them where the villain of the story wasn't someone unlikeable like Malfoy in Harry Potter, but a complex character like Harriet with all her strengths and faults.
My son was correct: I was a total Harriet The Spy kid. I wrote about other people and my relationship to them to try and understand my world. Luckily, no one ever read my diary (except maybe my siblings). Harriet wasn't a favourite book of mine as a kid. I recognized myself in her so much, that I remember quickly putting the book aside, as if it were too close to me. I shared this experience with a friend recently, and she laughed, and said she was The Babysitters Club. (This sounds much more wholesome to me, and that's probably why she's a therapist, and I write fiction.) One friend, with a troubled childhood, told me she was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and another friend with religious yearnings identified with Chaim Potok's Davida's Harp.
And you, was there a childhood book that spoke to you?
