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Anne Lamott was thirty-five, single, and newly sober when she gingerly entered the world of motherhood. Already a seasoned novelist born in 1954 in San Francisco, this transformative period of her life became the foundation for her first foray into non-fiction, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year. Far from offering a rosy,…
Today’s Diary Entry –
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I am absolutely convinced that George is going to lose
When she wrote the following diary entry in October of 1992, First Lady Barbara Bush had been living at the White House for more than three years and was accustomed to the constant scrutiny and pace of political life. Exactly a month later, as she predicted, Bill Clinton won the presidential election and ousted the…
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It was so horribly fascinating that I felt spellbound
During World War I, the skies over Britain were periodically lit up by German Zeppelins in what would become known as “The First Blitz.” These enormous airships seemed almost invincible as they loomed over cities, striking terror into the hearts of civilians below, and between 1915 and 1918, 51 raids were carried out, claiming the…
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I have woken fairly early to think about human life
Frances Partridge was a remarkable British diarist born in 1900 whose long life was interwoven with the illustrious Bloomsbury Group. By 1967, when she wrote the following entry, she had already lost two of her nearest and dearest: her husband, Ralph, in 1960, and then tragically their only son, Burgo, three years later due to…
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The important thing is to keep going
Born in London in 1909, Stephen Spender’s talent was recognised early on by T.S. Eliot, who published Spender’s first book, Poems, at Faber & Faber in 1933. Spender wrote the following diary entry six years later, a few days after lunching with Eliot and with the world teetering on the brink of war—a perilous moment…
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She cured me of the disease of night fear
Dawn Powell was a master of incisive, sharp-witted prose that dissected the intricacies and follies of the human experience. Born in Ohio in 1896, she moved to New York City in her early twenties and quickly became an active member of the literary scene, writing novels, plays, and essays which, while not commercially successful during…
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Man cannot live long without joy
Dorothy Day was an influential American journalist and social activist who co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement in the 1930s. Driven by her deep spiritual convictions, Day was a relentless advocate for social justice, and in the late 1930s and early 1940s her work took on a new urgency as the world plunged into World War…
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