"On Keeping a Notebook"

Paper Summary:

This paper introduces, discusses and analyzes the essay "On Keeping a Notebook," written by Joan Didion. Specifically, it discusses cause and effect reflected in the essay. The paper describes the writing of Didion and the memories that she records in her notebook. It then discusses how these entries illustrate the concept of cause and effect.

From the Paper:

"Another cause and effect of Didion's notebook are the memories she chooses to record there. Often, she makes them up, rather than basing them in reality, and they change her memories of events and family get-togethers. She notes the often say, "'That's simply not true,' the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event" (Didion). Her mind does not record events the way they happened, it records events as she would like to see them happen, and this is very distressing to many of the people around her. So, her notebook causes her to change or bend her own reality into something more pleasing or more memorable. The cause and effect is that it causes others to question her memories, but it adds details and interest to her writings when she incorporates these unreal memories. "Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me" (Didion). She indicates that reality is not nearly as important to her as the ideas and memories she has created in her notebook, and she does not understand why others are so bound to what "really" happened."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Didion, Joan. "On Keeping a Notebook." University of the Witwatersrand. 2006. 12 March 2007. <http://www.wits.ac.za/humanities/lls/holistic/didion2.htm>

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