Dear Diary Reading for Santa Fe Film Festival

Dear Diaries: I’m looking forward to your debut on September 23, the first day of Autumn. I’m counting on you to help me share that time gone by, those stormy teenage years. I’ll read aloud the highs and lows, angst and joy, the intense hopes and dreams, the family drama. It all started with my decision to at last write a book about growing up adopted.

How did The Goodbye Baby, my memoir-in-progress, lead to a theatrical production? Last spring, I dug out a lifetime of yearly diaries. In order to understand how my adoption and reunion with birthparents influenced my life, I'd decided to harvest my journals. Of particular interest were teenage years. Once I began reading the diary entries from 1956 to 1960, I realized that many decisions and patterns grew out of adolescent perspectives. The diaries, surprisingly, were entertaining. Some of the recorded experiences, then humiliating, were now funny; other passages were rather poignant. At the same time I was reviewing my own diaries, I came across an article about Sarah Brown's "Cringe Readings," based in Brooklyn. I also discovered that several of my friends were also reading their old journals. We began communal reading and thus the project grew into a six-woman staged reading.*
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Am I suffering from writer's block? Have I abandoned The Goodbye Baby? Not really. Diaries ARE a kind of interior memoir. Reading diaries can be healing, especially when shared with fellow diarists. In youth, second chances were abundant. As one gets older, it becomes obvious that achievements dearly hoped for are never going to happen. Enjoying my diaries has provided a cure for the angst of dashed dreams and led to self-acceptance.

As John Updike said, “the need to not look foolish is one of youth’s many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness.”

"DEAR DIARY" is scheduled for Sunday, September 23 at the Film Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. All proceeds benefit the upcoming eighth annual Santa Fe Film Festival.