Sarah Fay on Not Keeping A Notebook
Read Sarah's new essay about destroying the evidence and getting rid of yourself
Sarah Fay and I bonded over a deep love of cats. They pretty much rule our lives. We went on to discover we both also love doing interviews: Sarah did a near-record six interviews for The Paris Review, one of which you’ll read about below. We love big cities, great literature, and we’ve both struggled with chronic health issues: for me, the aftermath of head and brain injury, for Sarah manifestations of mental illness from which she’s now recovered.
Sarah guides us through her twenty-five years in the mental health system in her journalistic memoir Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses. Described as “powerful, mesmerizing, and unputdownable” by memoirist Anthony Swofford, it calls for a new conversation about mental health diagnosis, one based on rigorous transparency. It was an Apple Best Books pick, hailed in The New York Times as a “fiery manifesto of a memoir,” and named by Parade Magazine as one of the sixteen best mental health memoirs to read. She serialized her follow up memoir, Cured, on Substack.
Sarah has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, and The Paris Review, where she was an advisory editor, and is on the creative writing faculty at Northwestern University. She loves helping people succeed on Substack and channels all her wisdom and enthusiasm into the tremendously popular Substack Writers at Work.
Last summer, Sarah filled in the Beyond Questionnaire which you can read here.
Her essay on the link between notebooks, mental health, and the very human desire to reinvent ourselves really touched my heart. I think it will touch yours, as well.
Enjoy!
xJane
On Not Keeping a Notebook (and “Pathological Decluttering”)
There are two types of people in this world: those who keep a notebook (or diary or journal) and those who don’t. Those who feel the need to record their days and inner thoughts (or progress toward a goal or the world around them) and those who would just rather skip it. Those who keep Moleskine in business and those who think Leuchtturm1917 is a historical event.
Then—at the edges—there’s a third group: those who keep notebooks and destroy them.
Like many in group three, I spent years buying and filling notebooks of various sizes (A5, A4, B7), prices (expensive, cheap, ultra-cheap, ultra-expensive), brands (Field Notes, Clairefontaine, Apica), and page layouts (lined, unlined, dotted). Some were only partly filled before I didn’t like what I saw—who I saw—and destroyed them.
Joan Didion, who wrote “On Keeping a Notebook,” explains why: “[O]ur notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’”
I wanted escape my implacable “I,” become someone else, someone I wasn’t, someone (I love this term) mentally sound.
The need to destroy the notebooks I’d filled came in a blur, a rush. I never set fire to them—that would’ve been melodramatic—just threw them away, always with a new notebook at the ready.
Once, on a trip to Tokyo and after my return, this played out as clearly as it ever had. I was there to interview the Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe for The Paris Review—an opportunity I half experienced between panic attacks and crying spells.
My mind was unhinged and unmanageable, much as it had been since the age of twelve when I received my first psychiatric diagnosis. That was why I traveled—for work, sure, but mostly impulsively, randomly, to escape the edginess, irritability, anxiety, crushing depression (which came every day at 4 PM), and manic-ish episodes that made up a large part of my life. (I moved apartments about every year for the same reason.)
The potential was too delicious: In a different place, I might become a different person.
Notebooks followed the same faulty logic: new notebook, new mind, new me.
I wasn’t a natural-born diarist, not someone who kept my tender childhood thoughts under teeny lock and key. My first didn’t come until my twenties and only because that’s what writers did, and I wanted to be a writer. I’d been wooed by Sylvia Plath’s journals (ah, the melodrama, particularly during the Smith years) and Virginia Woolf’s notebooks and journals (oh, the brilliance). Important people wrote down their thoughts for posterity, and I wanted to be important in the superficial way we think of importance, i.e., known, famous, recognized, approved of by others.
On that trip to Tokyo, I’d been keeping a small, soft-cover Moleskine that doubled as my wallet. It was faded blue and worn at the edges, the band stretched from opening and closing it so much. Inside, on the beige-yellowish paper, my handwriting filled the pages.
It held the usual writerly scribblings: ideas for stories and poems, articles to write, descriptions of strangers and settings. Some pages had diary-ish entries—accounts of my days, progress toward some goal or other, musings that probably seemed profound at the time.
Then there were the journal-ish entries, my uncensored thoughts on paper. In those, the words were jagged, revved-up, spikey, anxious—often breaking out of the narrow lines. Or they were languid and thick as if the letters themselves were heavy with depression.
I tried to replace it with a graceful, soft-cover Midori, larger and thinner than the Moleskine. (Japan’s brands are legendary: Maruman, Kokuyo, Yamamoto, Stalogy, Midori, Hobonichi. It seemed impossible to choose.) The cover was light yellow. Inside was soft, lightly dotted paper.
Graceful. Delicate. Soft. Light. Not at all the person I was.
New notebook. New mind. New me.
It didn’t work. It never worked.
When I returned to my tiny house in Iowa City, jittery and on edge from not sleeping, I left the new Midori on my dining room table. Tattered Moleskine in hand, I went up to my attic office. It was too hot and stuffy to write. (Central air was something I dreamed of.) Sweating, I sat on the floor. My hand shook as I pulled the silver trashcan toward me.
It’s not that I thought someone would find my notebooks and use them against me, see all my patterns of thoughts, my obsessions, my melancholies, and give me yet another diagnosis. (I’d received five by that point—doctors aimlessly trying to label my mental and emotional pain.) Or posthumously diagnose me the way we do when we anachronistically say Einstein had ADHD and idiotically wonder what it would have been like if he’d taken Ritalin.1
Or maybe I did.
I held the Moleskine over the trashcan and let it fall. The jitteriness subsided, slightly. Then I took a cloth-covered storage cube from the bookshelf and threw away the two other notebooks that hadn’t yet met their demise.
This was something I did: rid myself of myself. Notebooks weren’t the only victims: photos, notes on bits of paper, anything I’d saved. There are only a handful of photos of me from the ages of twenty through forty-five.
All the evidence gone.
The irony was that throwing away my notebooks (and photos and scraps of paper) coupled with my immaculately clean, spartanly furnished home could have been categorized as a symptom of a psychiatric diagnosis. Symptom: compulsive decluttering. Diagnosis: obsessive-compulsive disorder.
An even greater irony? That anyone in our materialistic, capitalist culture of too much could be seen as mentally unsound for throwing or giving away their possessions. Of course, Marie-Kondoing can tip over into toxic, distressing behavior, but to piggyback on Kirsten Powers’s “The Way We Live in the United States Is Not Normal,” the way we pathologize ourselves and those around us is not normal.
A decade or so later, when my agent went to sell my memoir Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses, the Knopf editor interested asked what kind of documentation I had. Had I kept a notebook? Journals? Photographs? I don’t remember what I said, but I hedged, a pit forming in my stomach, worried they wouldn’t bid because I couldn’t account for those years beyond my memories of them. Why hadn’t I kept all those notebooks?
Just before Pathological came out, my publicist asked me for photos of myself for the B-roll so we could pitch the big morning shows: CBS This Morning, Good Morning America—those prime TV spots that seem to ensure a place on the bestseller list. The idea was that I should have (or was expected to) document my repeated descents into and rises out of madness. It simply never crossed my mind to ask someone to snap a photo of me during a suicidal episode in the emergency room.
In her essay, Didion describes how, with a notebook, “it all comes back.” She admires how a notebook allows us to stay “on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise…[w]e forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget…forget who we were.”
Those are times I’m happy to forget. I wouldn’t wish them on anyone.
Now that I’m fully recovered from serious mental illness, I’m on nodding terms with who I used to be—often I appreciate her, sometimes want to hug her—but I wouldn’t want to spend time with her, which seems like an exceedingly mentally sound thing to feel.
Today, I don’t “keep” a notebook, but I plan and outline and think and write on paper using a Rhodia A4, top spiral bound (I’m mystified by side spiral bound notebooks—you can’t write on both sides of the paper without crimping the side of your hand), dotted (never lined).
When an anxiety attack or bout of depression descends (because recovery does not mean I never feel them—they are part of what it means to be human), I go through a process of writing down my thoughts. The woman who taught me this process calls it the 4 N’s: notice the thoughts (write them down), normalize them (see how they might be reasonable responses to a situation given that our minds are evolutionarily designed to look for the negative and overreact as if we’re in mortal danger at all times, even when answering email), neutralize them (get the facts), and consider the next best thought or action.2 Sometimes, all it takes is writing and rereading my troubling thoughts to see how extreme and unreasonable they often are.
Then I rip off the paper and throw it away.
Adult ADHD was invented in 1994 by Allen Frances, et al. when it was entered into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Frances has since apologized for creating a diagnosis based on zero scientific evidence.
Credit to life coach Corrinne Crabtree for teaching me the 4 N’s. And I couldn’t publish this essay without mentioning Jillian Hess and her beautiful Substack Noted.
How interesting, I write in many notebooks and constantly misplace them. Then I use others I’ve just found filled with prior disjointed pages. I believe their place is not to record my thoughts but to give them a place to go- to get them out so that they no longer burden me, somehow what’s left in my brain is more organized, most of the time.
Not only could I not save my notebooks, I couldn't really even write about myself (even in private) because I could not stand how I looked/sounded to myself in their pages. I read it as whining, messed up, and altogether not what I had decided a person should be. (Because, lacking a stable sense of self due to the many experiences and facts I write about, I had to use a long list of shoulds to fill in for what most folks can do with likes, wants, needs, and boundaries.)
So, of course I am now a writing professor and researcher who studies, recommends, and uses notebooks. Life has a way of INSISTING that we listen to what we need to know, eventually. So much more to unpack about this.