Sociologist Sees Your Diary as American History
by Deborah Medenbach
[The following passages with minor editing are from an article based on an in-person interview with Audrey Borenstein at her home in New Paltz, New York. It was written shortly after Audrey Borenstein and Olivia Dresher formed the LWC. The article was published in the Times Herald-Record on August 18, 2004.]
“May I have a look at your diary?”
Retired New Paltz sociologist Audrey Borenstein wants American diarists to be receptive to that question.
Borenstein and publisher Olivia Dresher, of Seattle, formed the Life Writing Connection to preserve privately held, unpublished journals, letters and memoirs of 20th-century Americans. An annotated directory will be made of the listing entries they receive. The directories will be used by researchers, libraries and anyone interested in life writing.
“We’ve just started to distribute information about the LWC, and so the number of completed forms I’ve received so far for the directory has been small,” Dresher said from her Seattle office. “But many people have told me that they’re enthusiastic about the project and plan to register their writings.”
Borenstein has crafted two academic books on the subject of older women in 20th-century America. Her research taught her that a treasure-trove of experiential information about modern history lay in notebooks stashed in attics, closets and nightstands throughout America.
“The key value is that a reader will know what it was like to have lived through what you did in this time in the United States. It was experienced on American soil. There was no one who sat like Jane Austen to observe [your] life while it was going on. You have to infer the exterior [from] wills, records, etc. But the journals are the workings of inner experience,” Borenstein said…. “This [journal] gives you an understanding of a time that has gone by. What was it like to go through the flu epidemic of 1918? What about the labor movement after World War II? What you remember is of great significance.”
Those who inherit boxes of journals often store them for posterity or throw them out, not recognizing their worth beyond the single life journey they contain.
Borenstein, who spent years editing her personal journals to leave to her children, knows her diaries may appeal to a broader audience. Like most diarists, she has boxes of her books in closets and filing cabinets throughout her tidy home, hidden from casual view…
“I sought a way to preserve life writing beyond leaving it to descendants. LWC is a repository of journals, letters, diaries. I wanted to accommodate everybody. Every life has value…”
Sharing the journals also fosters a smidgen of immortality. Borenstein has several very close friends she only knows through decades of correspondence, Dresher among them. Making her journals available allows her to be known by people of like mind who may come centuries after her.
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