"If nothing else, a diary teaches you what you’re interested in."

"Perhaps at the beginning you restrict yourself to issues of social injustice or all the unfortunate people trapped beneath the rubble in Turkey or Italy or wherever the last great earthquake hit. You keep the diary you feel you should be keeping, the one that, if discovered by your mother or college roommate, would leave them thinking, If only I was as civic-minded/ bighearted/ philosophical as Edward! After a year, you realize it takes time to rail against injustice, time you might better spend questioning fondue or describing those ferrets you couldn’t afford. Unless, of course, social injustice is your thing, in which case — knock yourself out. The point is to find out who you are and to be true to that person. Because so often you can’t. Won’t people turn away if they know the real me? you wonder. The me that hates my own child, that put my perfectly healthy dog to sleep? The me who thinks, deep down, that maybe The Wire was overrated?"

From "Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002)," by David Sedaris. That passage — from the introduction — appealed to me because it also applies to blogging: It teaches you what you’re interested in. You can set your blog to private, making it just like a diary, something you write for yourself but not without the capacity to think someone else could see this, if I changed the setting. The thing is that if you maintain a daily writing practice, after a year (or so), you'll have worn down, and if you're still there, you can't still be posing for the admiration of your imagined audience. Can you?

And here's the interview Sedaris just did with Terry Gross (on "Fresh Air"), which got especially intense as he talked about the suicide of his sister Tiffany:

Looking back over her life, my mom never really liked Tiffany very much. Tiffany was too much like my mother, and I remember that as a child almost ... I just thought, Ugh, wouldn't want to be Tiffany. ...

The rest of us should've said, "Mom, you need to do something about this, because that's not OK for you to treat somebody that way." But we never said that. We never called our mother on her behavior towards Tiffany. You think, You're 7, what are you going to do? But I wasn't always 7. I was 20 and I was 30. ... Tiffany had a lot of anger at us and a lot of it was really well-founded. We were adults, we could've said to our mother, "This isn't OK." ...

That came after he'd said a lot — and this is only on the audio, not in the text at the link — about how he was his mother's favorite. He made it sound as though he'd acquired much of his own literary power through her.

ADDED: This post had me going back to the starting point of this blog, and I see that in my second post, I describe the moment I decided to start blogging. It was funny to see that it happened in the middle of listening to "Fresh Air":

I was in the midst of cleaning out my office, having just covered the floor with books and papers. I paused the direct streaming "Fresh Air" I was listening to and checked my email, which included a colleague's description of her reasons for starting a blog. I had just emailed her about my admiration for her and my own timidity: "I'll have to think about getting up the nerve to do this sort of thing. It seems if you're going to do it, you need to become somewhat chatty and revealing, which is a strange thing to do to the entire world." Then it seemed altogether too lame not to go ahead and start the blog.

I'm reading some of the earliest posts and — maybe just because I'm reading Sedaris's Diaries — they seem a lot like Sedaris's Diaries:

Next to me at the hair-washing station of the salon was a woman who was ranting about bangs.

"I've always had bangs. Then, not having bangs, I was going crazy."