‘I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train’ wrote Oscar Wilde, in The Importance of Being Ernest. In this episode Kate is joined by critic, editor and podcaster Lucy Scholes and regular guest Phil Chaffee to explore the intimate world of diaries. Can immersing ourselves in the details of other people’s lives offer us valuable insight into how to fully appreciate the passing moments of our own? From gossipy self-mythologising Samuel Pepys right up to the present with the experimentation of Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries, and the beauty and hard-won insight of Helen Garner’s Baillie Gifford prize-winning diaries collected in How to End a Story. Also not to be missed, living it up Vanity Fair style through the glitz and glamour of ’80s New York, with Tina Brown.
Listen via the media player below or via your preferred podcast player here
And if you enjoy this conversation don’t miss Part II, over on the Patreon, where we swap notes on our favourite fictional diaries, consider the diaries we’d love to read if they had only been published and share some thoughts on our own diary keeping. You’ll find that episode plus lots of other benefits including ad-free listening, extra episodes, being part of our community of readers and the pod book club over at patreon.com/thebookclubreview.
And to take advantage of that Serious Readers offer of £150 off any HD light head to serious readers.com/bcr and use the code BCR at checkout.
Book list
The Private Life of the Diary by Sally Bayley
They by Kay Dick
Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke
Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady by Dinah Brooke
Part of the Story by Margaret Busby
Woman Alive by Susan Ertz
Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld
Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista
Look Closer by Robert Douglas Fairhurst
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Robert Latham (ed)
How To End a Story by Helen Garner
Henry Chips Channon: The Diaries
Writing Home by Alan Bennett
There and Back: 1999–2009 by Michael Palin
The Vanity Fair Diaries 1983–1992 by Tina Brown
End of a Berlin Diary by William L. Shirer
War in Val D’Orcia by Iris Origo
Russian Journal by Andrea Lee
Beloved Son Felix: Coming of Age in the Renaissance by Felix Platter
Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop by Alba Donati
Modern Nature by Derek Jarman
Pharmacopeia by Derek Jarman
Went to London, Took the Dog by Nina Stibbe
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter
