{"id":160613,"date":"2022-07-11T12:01:18","date_gmt":"2022-07-11T16:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=160613"},"modified":"2022-07-11T12:02:22","modified_gmt":"2022-07-11T16:02:22","slug":"diary-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/07\/11\/diary-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Diary, 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

To my retroactive disappointment, the journals I keep\u2014I fill about one marble composition book a year\u2014are an undifferentiated, undated jumble of fiction drafts, semifictionalized self-reflections, actual diary entries, to-do lists, lesson plans, notes for articles I\u2019m writing, and strange doodles often in the form of heavily inked trapezoidal grids. I wish that the notebooks more frequently included scenes like this, in which I simply recorded, without much commentary or elaboration, what I remembered right after a conversation with my younger sister sometime in 2011, when she would have been thirteen and I twenty-five. Too often when I write personally I simply record states of mind, which have been frustratingly static and melodramatic over the years and often seem to be stylized in a way that I find unconvincing, even to myself. This page presents a clearer picture of what life was like at the time\u2014quizzing my sister about her religious beliefs, asking her about TV shows and who Bruno Mars was. I was encouraging her to be open-minded about religion, even as a devout nonbeliever myself, probably out of some quasiparental instinct. She described an idiosyncratic cosmography: no to God, yes to guardian angels. Apparently she wanted to be a doctor at the time. (She ended up going to art school, a family tradition.) I was living in New York, home for the weekend, visiting my parents in New Jersey. The next decade took me to Montana, Virginia, and Boston before I circled back to Brooklyn just in time for the pandemic. I saw my sister in Philadelphia recently. She was driving the car, and we talked about what was on her mind now. Gay bars, the Supreme Court. I did not ask about angels.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Andrew Martin is the author of the novel<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>Early Work\u00a0<\/span>and the story collection<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>Cool for America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cToo often when I write personally, I simply record states of mind.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1506,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68416],"tags":[20345,6774,10484,7682,694,1786],"class_list":["post-160613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diaries","tag-andrew-martin","tag-angels","tag-cars","tag-diaries","tag-philadelphia","tag-religion"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDiary, 2011 by Andrew Martin<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"July 11, 2022 \u2013 \u201cToo often when I write personally, I simply record states of mind.\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\/07\/11\/diary-2011\/\" \/>\n<meta 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