{"id":164357,"date":"2023-05-30T14:00:51","date_gmt":"2023-05-30T18:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=164357"},"modified":"2023-05-30T16:04:12","modified_gmt":"2023-05-30T20:04:12","slug":"diaries-1994-1999","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/05\/30\/diaries-1994-1999\/","title":{"rendered":"Diary, 1994\u20131999"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t read my old work anymore. After a decade as a writer, I know exactly what it\u2019ll make me feel\u2014compassion, some pity; maybe there will be a phrase that I\u2019ll admire, \u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00adbut mostly I\u2019ll feel self-loathing. Last year I came across my diary from a summer when, five years after having arrived in Oklahoma as a refugee from Iran, I was determined to win a national championship in Tae Kwon Do so I could get in to an Ivy League university. It was the summer of 1994, and I was fifteen. I kept the diary because I was lonely, weighed down by money worries and shame of being Iranian, desperate to perform my Christian faith. I was anorexic and addicted to Tae Kwon Do, which I practiced for six or seven hours a day. Writing in the diary was a self-soothing mechanism\u2014I wrote down every kind word anyone said to me.<\/em><\/p>\n

Reading it now, I feel gentler toward my old self, a version of me now nearly three decades in the past. I read her entries like I might read a daughter\u2019s. Maybe when I\u2019m seventy, I will read my forty-year-old self with similar compassion. The most interesting parts of the diary come at the end. After that summer, I returned to the diary in 1995, 1997, 1998, and twice in 1999, and in each entry I seem appalled by my voice in the one before it until finally I give up and stop writing in it altogether. There was no chance of sounding anything but stupid to the Dina of the following year, though she was the audience I was most eager to impress. The penultimate entry, from February 1999, during my sophomore year at Princeton, reads: \u201cNote to Junior Dina: Don\u2019t read this crap anymore.\u201d Then, a few months later, scribbling a final entry on a locker clean-out notice: \u201cI\u2019ll always be a stupid kid. Good thing I realized that now.\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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

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The following two pages are from a later entry, August 2, 1994.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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Dina Nayeri is the author of two novels and a book of creative nonfiction,<\/i> The Ungrateful Refugee, which won the<\/i> 2020<\/em> Geschwister-Scholl-Preis<\/i>\u00a0and was a finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Nayeri is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant, an O. Henry Prize, and the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize. Her writing has appeared in<\/i>\u00a0the<\/em> New York Times,<\/em> the<\/em> Guardian,<\/em> the<\/em> Washington Post,<\/em> The New Yorker,<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/i>Granta.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI read her entries like I might read a daughter\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2372,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68416],"tags":[7682,68674],"class_list":["post-164357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diaries","tag-diaries","tag-dina-nayeri"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDiary, 1994\u20131999 by Dina Nayeri<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 30, 2023 \u2013 \u201cI read her entries like I might read a daughter\u2019s.\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\/2023\/05\/30\/diaries-1994-1999\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta 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