When I looked up my book, Reading Between the Lines: TheDiaries of Women, to check on Martha Ballard, I couldn’t stop reading. I apologize for blowing my own horn, but after such a long time since I wrote it I encountered it almost as a new book. I am so impressed with the writing! - as well as with the content. (I did a huge amount of research for it.) It never got a good review because I had been type-cast by that time as a DIY self-helper. The Globe and Mail reviewer thought it was “how to write a diary”. (I don’t think he read it.) It sold out at a women’s bookstore in Vancouver, I remember., but how often does that happen? I actually bought 500 copies when Key Porter remaindered it. That was before I moved back to Toronto from Muskoka where I lived for 16 years and thought I’d never leave. (I’m glad I did; it’s cheaper to live in the city.) I still have some copies in my locker, and f I still sell a few (5$ a copy, plus postage).
Such is the life of a writer. But I still enjoy me.
But I digress. I was going to quote me from the diaries book —fair usage. I wrote this bit when I was in Cambridge, Mass. as a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe. I was actually working on a new play about Alice James (sister of William and Henry). It’s good,too, and it had a couple of prestigious, publicly attended staged readings in Cambridge and Boston. Unfortunately, Susan Sontag had just written a play about Alice James, called “Alice in Bed”—sick and dying. The play was, too, and lasted about four nights on Broadway. I wrote a critic, a.d. at the time of the ART Theatre in Cambridge, complaining about Sontag’s play, and sent him mine. He read it and agreed that mine was better, BUT, he said, MY NAME WAS NOT SUSAN SONTAG. I knew that.
Anyway, while I was at the Bunting, I was allowed to take any course available at Harvard/Radcliffe for free. I had already decided that my next book would be about women’s diaries. (That’s where I got my idea to do a play about Alice James, from her diary.) so I applied to get into a workshop-seminar about diaries. We had to write to get in as it was limited to about a dozen people who had to qualify. Over the course, we had to submit some of our own regular diary excerpts to indicate what we were thinking and doing. The following is one of my excerpts, and I put it in the preface of my book about women’s diaries. but this has gone on too long, so l will put it in tomorrow’s blog.
Anon.