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  • The Paris Review

    The Anonymous Diary

    by Kathryn Scanlan Jun 11, 2019 5 minutes

     

    I had her diary in the top left drawer of my desk, held together by the cutout bottom of a paper grocery sack. She’d been eighty-six years old in 1968—the first of the five full years she recorded. I didn’t know her. I had her diary because the person who’d previously possessed it passed away, and when their effects were sold at public auction, the diary—discarded, unwanted—ended up in my hands.

    I searched for her online in 2004 or 2005 or 2006. I may have searched again in 2007 or 2008 or 2009. I couldn’t find her—not even an obituary. I wanted to know more, but when I was not able to find it, I stopped wondering. This was a life not retrievable by search engine, I thought. There was something pleasing in that.

    The diary became something I took out often to look through, toShe wrote about the people she knew: their comings and goings, their physical and emotional states, their deaths.

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