"The journal, first envisioned as an amulet against the passage of time, has grown to overwhelming proportions."

"'I started keeping a diary twenty-five years ago,' [Sarah] Manguso writes. 'It’s eight hundred thousand words long.'... Of all the psychological conditions to be burdened with, graphomania is hardly the worst, and Manguso doesn’t quite succeed in dispelling the suspicion that she is a little proud of her eccentricities, perhaps even exaggerating them... In her memoir, Manguso makes the striking decision never to quote the diary itself. As she started to look through the old journals, she writes, she became convinced that it was impossible to pull the 'best bits' from their context without distorting the sense of the whole: 'I decided that the only way to represent the diary in this book would be either to include the entire thing untouched—which would have required an additional eight thousand pages—or to include none of it.' The diary, she observes, is the memoir’s 'dark matter,' everywhere but invisible, and the book revolves around a center that is absent. 'I envisioned a book without a single quote, a book about pure states of being,' she writes. 'It sounded almost religious when I put it that way.'"

From "Dear Diary, I Hate You/Reflections on journals in an age of overshare," a New Yorker review of a memoir called "Ongoingness."

The description of the connected process of obsessive journaling and carefully written memoirs reminded me of what David Sedaris has written about about carrying a notebook everywhere and continually jotting down observations, expanding it into a typed form every morning, making an index to help him find the .01% that "might possibly qualify as entertaining," and using that as material for the essays he uses in his public readings. He's kept this diary for 35 years, and: "Over a given three-month period, there may be fifty bits worth noting, and six that, with a little work, I might consider reading out loud...."