For The Record...

Why we write about our lives and how to turn our musings into shareable writing

I started keeping a journal at the age of fourteen after I read The Diary of Anne Frank. It was an experiment with interpretation. If something had happened, what did it mean? What could I make of it? It was also a way of having a lonely conversation about things I was too ashamed or afraid to ever say out loud.

As the self-appointed caretaker of family history and stories, I have always written journals and kept records. No need to ever ask who will take the minutes.

It became a habit, one I have kept up all these years. What began as a meaning-making problem has now become a storage problem.

I now have 68 journals in which I have documented and recorded my life. If we’ve been friends in real life or slept together, you likely feature in one of these.

I think of diaries as letters to myself, to work out what I think, how I feel, what the right decision might be, whether the relationships I’m in, are working.

I wrote journals through my romantic ups and downs; my pregnancies, early motherhood, immigration, and every phase of my life. In turn, many of my books have been drawn from these notes - Secret Mothers’ Business, The Reunion, Love in the Time of Contempt, Leaning into Love, When Hungry, Eat, and Unbecoming.

When Covid hit, I jotted ‘Notes in a Pandemic,’ to record the bizarre, extraordinary time in history as it unfolded. I took photos wherever regulations permitted me to venture, and documented the encroaching restrictions. I monitored my feelings and fears, and the responses of those around me to the mounting calamity. Someday from these shards, there would be a story here, that much I knew.

When my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, I began to write letters to her, to hold onto her as she was disappearing. My forthcoming memoir, Bring Us Home from Sorrow (which will be published by Ginninderra Press in early 2026) is drawn from these letters, written over three years, as well as notes I kept during the pandemic. It has the metronomic quality of a diary, of days unfolding in all their ordinary horror, as time ticks down to an inevitable separation.

I am fascinated by diaries and letters and what they reveal about the immediate lived experience of history. Some of my favourite books include Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and The Dark Interval: letters for the grieving heart, the diaries of Ettie Hillesum, Anais Nin, Anne Truitt, Helen Garner, May Sarton’s journals, Frances Partridge’s Other People (Diaries 1963-1966) and in more modern form, Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files (though these are letters in response to questions fans send him).

I have always imagined that all authors keep journals, but I’ve subsequently discovered this is not so. Some authors keep their words purely for their audience. For me, the writing I share always begins with my private musings, where I work out the shape of my thinking first.

Once I have something threshed out on the page, only then do I begin to construct it for a reader. It’s simply how my relationship with writing works.

Recently, I came across British essayist, artist and psychoanalyst Marion Milner, who wrote under the pseudonym Joanna Field. She wrote A Life of One’s Own which grapples with the deep question of what it means to live a truly authentic existence. This book is a record of her journey of self exploration.

I love this excerpt:

This echoes something I have always felt, and has influenced the way I teach writing. My first focus is always on the writer. Who is the person doing the writing? When this idea began to form, I built an online writing course, the Author Awakening Adventure which is built around ‘consciousness’ or qualities of the spirit such as curiosity, conviction and courage, and from there, I began to teach the craft. All writing begins with who we are as people, our values, beliefs and ways of seeing the world. Our writing is always in service to a vision of life we each nurture.

It’s why I adore the genre of memoir when it’s done well, and why I love teaching memoir.

Here are some of my favourites:

• Maggie O Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

• Tyra Lynn, Homesick

• Tara Westover, Educated

• Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of A Wild Snail Eating

• Gina Chick, We are the Stars

• Joyce Kornblatt, Breaking Bread

I’ve also written so much in the genre, drawing from my own life experiences, and why I’m hosting a retreat in Portugal together with Anna Kwiecinska from 8 - 20 September 2026, for writers who want to deepen their practice of self exploration through memoir writing.

After five days of workshops we will retreat to a monastery for a few days to work on the material our lives have given us and to weave it into shareable writing.

If you’d like more detail, you can download the brochure here.

It will be a blessing to have your company and companionship, no matter whether you’re a first time writer or have been journalling for a lifetime.

And yes, your life is interesting enough, no matter the details.

And no, it’s not self-indulgent to write about your life - as long as you ‘cross the bridge between the personal and the universal,’ something we will spend much time thinking about. Writing about our lives is one way we show gratitude for the gifts and sorrows we have borne.

Be still, my soul and steadfast

Earth and heaven both are still watching

though time is draining from the clock

and your walk that was confident and quick

has become slow.

So, be slow, if you must, but let the heart

still play its true part.

Love still, as once you loved, deeply and without patience,

let God and the world know you are grateful.

That the gift has been given.

• Mary Oliver