{"id":159637,"date":"2022-05-23T11:00:29","date_gmt":"2022-05-23T15:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=159637"},"modified":"2022-05-22T12:15:43","modified_gmt":"2022-05-22T16:15:43","slug":"diary-1988","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/05\/23\/diary-1988\/","title":{"rendered":"Diary, 1988"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Last year, when my mother moved apartments, I came into possession of a largeish Prada box full of my childhood diaries. They go from 1981\u2014I was four, and dictated the diary to my aunt\u2014up to the nineties. I still haven\u2019t read most of them. (I think it was a handbag, and not a small one, that originally came in that Prada box.) It is hard work to feel love for one\u2019s childhood and adolescent self. Reading this entry, for example, I feel ashamed at my eleven-year-old self\u2019s American imperialistic attitude towards my grandparents, who hadn\u2019t heard of a planetarium before but \u201cliked it very much.\u201d It\u2019s interesting that I then apparently felt I had to explain the concept of a planetarium for the benefit of people \u201ca million years from now.\u201d The whole entry gives me a \u201cdutiful\u201d feeling, when I read it now. I think I used to feel like I had\u00a0<\/i>to be writing all this stuff down, maintaining a chatty, \u201cdelightful\u201d style, explaining every last thing down to the speech patterns of my fifth-grade science teacher, and appealing to some kind of \u201cuniversal\u201d reader who would understand it all and give each detail its proper value (although apparently this person also wouldn\u2019t know what a planetarium was). What even is a childhood diary\u2014for whom do we keep it?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Elif Batuman\u2019s first novel<\/em>, The Idiot<\/a>, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.<\/em> Its sequel,<\/em> Either\/Or,<\/a> will be published on May 24.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhat even is a childhood diary\u2014for whom do we keep it?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68416],"tags":[8892,7682,431,67827,124,26365,68440],"class_list":["post-159637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diaries","tag-childhood","tag-diaries","tag-elif-batuman","tag-featured","tag-new-york","tag-planetarium","tag-planets"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDiary, 1988 by Elif Batuman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 23, 2022 \u2013 \u201cWhat even is a childhood diary\u2014for whom do we keep it?\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/05\/23\/diary-1988\/\" \/>\n<meta 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