Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature

5. “What if Someone Reads It?”: Concealment and Revelation in Diary Fiction

144 Chapter 5 “What if Someone Reads It?” Concealment and Revelation in Diary Fiction In the previous three chapters, I have considered the potential bene fits of and threats to intimacy presented by young women’s interpersonal relationships; generally, narrators’ attitudes toward disclosure have been marked by their awareness of their vulnerability to such risks, while narrative intimacy has developed as a model or reflection of a contradictory expectation that young women should both seek intimacy and refrain from becoming too intimate with anyone. The model of storytelling employed by the narrators I have discussed thus far, furthermore, has placed less emphasis on the specific mode of communication than on the impulse driving that communication. While Ruby Oliver, discussed in Chapter 1, makes note of the laptop on which she is recording her story, most narrators depend upon a more vague use of narrative self-consciousness that clearly indicates their awareness of the storytelling process and their audience without identifying how their disclosure is being communicated . In this chapter, I shift from a focus on the type of disclosure being made to a closer examination of one common location for disclosure— namely, the diary, which has come to be closely associated with adolescent womanhood in contemporary American culture—and to the ways Concealment and Revelation in Diary Fiction 145 in which fictional adolescent women diarists actively anticipate readers in spite of the ostensibly private nature of the diary form. Because the diary itself represents both disclosure and concealment, as a diarist relies upon her diary as a space within which to reveal secrets for the express purpose of concealing them from others, fictional diaries provide the most overt opportunity for narrators to address their desire for a safe space within which to confess thoughts, feelings, and secrets they wish to conceal from other characters. In turn, as narrative intimacy in diary novels depends upon the narrators’ paradoxical expectations that the private diary will have at least one reader, the genre offers a useful means of considering the contradictory expectations surrounding adolescent women’s experiences of intimacy in contemporary American culture. Though young women’s personal diaries have been published and read by large audiences for centuries, suggesting that this “private” medium has frequently been understood as being anything but, the diary in contemporary America largely exists as a symbol of privacy and secret keeping . Indeed, diaries created for and marketed to young women frequently feature small (and often easily broken) locks and keys to ensure that the contents be kept secret.1 More generally, popular culture frequently represents young women writing furiously in pink notebooks that are then stashed under mattresses or in underwear drawers in the hopes of being kept secret from the prying eyes of parents and siblings. Such expectations of young women as diarists are reflected in nonfiction literature that offers advice about how to go about writing—and concealing—a diary. In Totally Private and Personal: Journaling Ideas for Girls and Young Women (1996), author Jessica Wilber—herself a teenager—says, “There are many good reasons for keeping a journal at this stage of your life and forever. It’s a good release when you’re angry, sad, troubled, or even wonderfully happy. It’s your safe haven for exploring your feelings and dreams” (1–2). Wilber goes on to note, “Remember, you’re the only one reading your journal, so don’t worry about what other people might think” (17), and she offers suggestions (such as developing a code, using “invisible ink,” or drafting a Privacy Contract with parents) for keeping contents private. The book also includes some of Wilber’s own journal entries as well as her mailing address; these gestures toward narrative intimacy invite the reader into a relationship that belies the privacy of the journal form. In Write It Down!: A Girl’s Guide to Keeping a Journal (1999), Erica Smith reinforces these statements as she instructs readers to select the type of journal carefully, to decorate and personalize it, and especially to find a safe place to hide 146 Concealment and Revelation in Diary Fiction it. Noting that “on any list of things that are important to you, privacy is probably right at the top,” she offers a list of “snoop-proofing maneuvers” to keep parents and siblings from reading the diary (Smith 24). To some degree, however, the emphasis...