The Diarists, or Deference to the Logic of Time

In a diary entry dated April 21, 1945, author Patricia Highsmith wrote that “the Russian and Allied armies have met in the district of Dresden.” It’s an example of how personal diaries can act as historical records, linking writers to the times in which they lived. Except it isn’t. History tells us that American and Soviet troops actually met in Torgau, not Dresden, on April 25, 1945—four days after Highsmith’s entry. How did such an error come to exist in her journal? The most likely explanation is that Highsmith, who always saw her diaries as somewhere between a personal project and a literary one, wrote some of her entries retrospectively and backdated them. 

I read The New York Years: Diaries & Notebooks 1941–1950 earlier this year; the book compiles a selection of Highsmith’s personal writings, produced during her twenties while she was living in Greenwich Village. Unlike Highsmith, I have never (intentionally) backdated a diary entry. Like Highsmith, I am a diarist; I’ve been journaling regularly since I was twelve years old–nearly half my life so far. Even without changing historical dates, as Highsmith does, I have found that there are plenty of ways to manipulate time on the page. 

In one sense, the diary abides quite strictly by the rules of time. Perhaps this is especially true of my diaries. My entries are all (accurately) dated, and each new day begins at the top of a new page, breaking the book up into familiar temporal units. And, while some books enclose a single year and others house two or three, each book begins around January and ends around December. I write in my diaries with a deference to the logic of time; for some reason, I can’t help it. 

Even still, time passes differently in a diary. In real life, every day contains the same number of hours. In the diary, periods of one’s life shrink and expand without warning. Time is divided messily, unevenly, and often without a coherent logic. Time becomes malleable. 

In August 2023, I wrote: “I really need to write more in the fall; it feels like 2023 can hardly be counted as a year of journaling.” Indeed, I had written just twenty-six pages since the start of the year. The explanation I provided for my absence strikes me as extremely unsatisfying; I had purchased my first Moleskine notebook in January, and, daunted by the number of lines on each page, I was unmotivated to write. My diaries are my written record of my life. There is an absurdity to the fact that their existence could be so meaningfully altered by my purchasing a notebook with too many lines on the page. 

Now that I’m accustomed to the size and spacing of the Moleskine, this no longer impacts me; in January 2026 alone, I wrote twenty-five pages. To me, the past month hasn’t felt much longer than any other. But in the transcription of my life that I’ve created, this month will expand to the length of two, three, four months. Months are one way to measure the passage of time. Pages are another. 

Not only does time itself shrink and expand, but so too do the events that mark it. A diary is a history, assembled moment-to-moment according to the judgment of a singular writer. Highsmith’s diaries, despite spanning most of the Second World War, make little mention of its atrocities. She writes at length about personal goals and romantic entanglements, then punctuates these reflections with brief notes about the geopolitical climate. “Happy day in which I did too little, with not enough motivation,” she wrote on May 1, 1945. Then, in the following sentence, “Hitler is dead.” 

Highsmith’s diaries—and, I suspect, many of our diaries—alternate between feeling historical and ahistorical. Ambitious young women who want to be writers have existed throughout history. There’s a timelessness to many of her desires and preoccupations: creating art, achieving greatness, finding love. And then, a sudden jarring sentence, situating her back in history. I found myself asking why she didn’t write more about the horrifying, tragic period in which she lived. It felt disturbing, perhaps even morally wrong, that she should write about herself and her trivial desires during such a period. 

Will the diary entry always feel grossly self-centred when read through the lens of history? My own January 2026 entries make no mention of this month’s geopolitics—despite no shortage of upsetting news headlines. Instead, I write about, well, everything that Highsmith writes about: wanting to produce great writing, wanting to fall in love. Admitting this gives me the same feeling of disgust that I got when reading Highsmith’s diaries. My immediate instinct is to dig up old entries where I do talk about politics—because of course there are many—and to quote them as proof that I am an empathetic and politically-conscious person, even in the most private of venues. But doing so wouldn’t change the fact that the vast majority of my personal writings are, in fact, about things that don’t matter. 

Not only do the events highlighted in my diaries rarely have geopolitical significance, but they often don’t even have personal significance. Last week, I wrote a paragraph about how I was “seized with a sudden and strong desire to buy a dictionary.” This felt incredibly worthy of the space that I dedicated to it at the time, though I did not go buy a dictionary and probably won’t in the foreseeable future. This isn’t a thought that matters to anyone. It isn’t even a thought that really matters to me. 

Even though we control the timelines of our diaries, we don’t necessarily rewrite time in a way that reflects who we are and what matters to us. Highsmith didn’t write at all in her diary from May to November of 1944 because, in her own telling, she was too focused on simply living a happy life. Moments and memories from this period that might have been quite significant to Highsmith are lost, though she seems to have chronicled every mundane minute of her more prolific years. 

The diary contains time, stretches time, shrinks time, manipulates time, all while progressing linearly forwards. But the diary also flattens time, allowing writer and reader both to traverse it in all directions. The diary captures the past, present, and future of every moment recorded within it. When Highsmith wrote in 1943 about her love for a woman named Allela, those entries contain not just a present feeling but an imagined future. Later in the year, when she meets another woman named Chloe, that imagined future is shattered, suddenly replaced with a new set of romantic longings. 

My own diaries contain endless imagined futures. In January 2018, at fifteen years old, I wrote with anxiety about the looming prospect of turning thirty. I imagined myself with “a job and a house, plus a spouse and maybe kids.” Kids, plural, before thirty? A house, in this economy? These projections strike me now as coming from a nervous teenager without a clear sense of self, conjuring the safest possible image of adulthood. At the time, they all felt like far-off inevitabilities. 

To return to the past in the form of a diary entry is also to travel to a new present, to access a lost future. Time collapses in on itself. Every page is as real and immediate as the next, even if it tells of dreams and desires that no longer exist in the world beyond. There is an unexpected formlessness to the diary, then, a transcendence beyond the easy relationships between past, present, and future. 

In April 2015, at the age of twelve, I wrote about a boy I had a crush on: “I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone as much as I love [him].” The future I imagined for myself consisted of eternal pining and cinematic loneliness; the absurdity of it makes me smile now. What felt painful at the time has become a source of joy.