Читать книгу A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip - Alexander Masters, Alexander Masters - Страница 15

My diary is now a work of art – am not afraid of people reading it, though it is so intimate.

Aged twenty-one

As soon as I had the idea to write a biography of this anonymous diarist – a biography in which the biographer doesn’t know who his subject is – I was struck by an odd fact. Whenever I fantasised that she was somebody famous I felt immediately, and as decisively as if the books had been dropped on my head, bored.

The great excitement of an anonymous diary is that it might belong to anybody. Even giving ‘I’ a name destroyed a vital thing that made the books interesting – a sense of quiet universality. I wanted to know what the women I passed in the street or sat beside on the train were thinking, and these books, I thought, would tell me. Give the diarist a name and she became just another stranger who didn’t want to accept my gaze. Imagine that she turned out to be some celebrity and the books (and my voyeurism) became almost nauseating.

It says a great deal for the diarist that, for the next four years, she managed to keep me reading without displaying a single moment of coarseness or impropriety. She has remained, throughout the guided tour she has given me of her mind, honest, funny, outlandish … and respectable.

When, beyond the grave, I meet this extraordinary ordinary woman, I will tell her so.