Fall: Inspiration from Diaries and Memoirs

I am always insisting that my students need to read more --and read more widely. This is often interpreted as a task too hard to bear. SAT Prep, ok. Classwork improvement, alright. READING OUTSIDE OF CLASS REQUIREMENTS?! No way! But honestly, you want to see your scores go up in everything from a standardized test to a class paper - then please read more. Memoirs and diaries make for great reading. The pace is quick, the chapters short and memorable.

You want something poignant (e.g. something to make you cry and/or contemplate life)? Read the memoir Night by Eli Wiesel about his teenage experiences with his father in Auschwitz during World War II. You want something amusing, read The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell, who chronicles what it was like to run a small bookshop in a remote Scottish Village at the dawn of Amazon. You want something that weaves carefully between poignant life lessons, despair and amusement --something you can use to build out your own skills in writing effectively? Consider reading Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus.

I read this for the first time as a teenager - grudgingly at the behest of my father who said everyone has the ability to write beautifully when telling their own story. By the end of the first paragraph I could not not put it down. It is the most powerful 150 pages I have ever read.

Written by a single-mother raising three children in a favela (slum) in Sao Paolo, Brazil, it was one of the first books ever published about daily life in slum by a person from there. She was not a woman who accepted her place and did nothing, she never stopped trying to raise herself or her children up and out of that place. I do not want to tell you the details of the story because I want you to read it for yourself, but I will give you some key points: Carolina pulled herself and her children out of poverty in the 1950s with the written word. The book is at times hard to pick up and hard to put down, because whatever your circumstances, this woman cuts you to the bone with her positivity in the face of so much suffering. She is almost always hungry, but she always feeds her children, and gets up to work, finding things she can sell, such as cans and bottles and paper for a pittance just to buy bread or rice for the children to eat. And yet she can be light-hearted at times, writing on July 25th: "I found the day beautiful and happy. I went out looking for paper." Her book drew international attention to the plight of people on the margins in slums worldwide, and was considered so scandalous that the cover was often torn off the book jackets. As the blurb says: "Written on scraps of paper picked from gutters, this is the raw, primitive journal of a street scavenger, Carolina Maria de Jesus, who fought daily for survival for herself and her three children..." You will write better after reading this, because what it is really about is the inspiration to keep going even when that way is harder than just giving up.