Joan Didion’s essay, “On Keeping a Notebook” considers the notebook as a way of revisiting subjective experience. The notebook is a nexus, each page containing wormholes to prior thoughts, feeling, and meaning. The gates of these throughways, the note itself, may initially appear arbitrary in comparison to the end destination. For example, the note “So what’s new in the whiskey business?” does not appear to connect to an existential awareness and fear of aging and death. Yet, this connection exists for Joan Didion (Didion, pg. 7).

The connection is forged off of the original observation, with subsequent meaning attached, and the chains of thought that blossom. The process is an organic process, and the link in the chain are oblique associations. The form of the essay reflects the subject of Didion revisiting the subjective experience of this organic process. She will introduce a note, recount the observation, and expands upon its meaning. In doing so, she brings the reader along with her for the revisiting. We understand how notes are generally used through her specific use. Thus, the form is functional. The essay is structured around the series of these revisitations, with each one integrated into the essay’s development; the use of notes, how she started, why use notes, etc. It is as if she is writing an essay while reviewing the notes one by one.

“On Keeping a Notebook” exhibits some of the codified essay poetics laid out in “Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay” by Carl Klaus; for example, the mimicry of contemplative thought process (pg. 5). Notice the little digressions Didion breaks from idea development to question the date of the memory she is remembering, “(1960? 1961?)” (Didion, pg. 22). Her conversational prose is closer to real thought patterns than the economical and precise prose of academic or article writing. Furthermore, the structure and form, idiosyncratic compared to the systematic academic style, is functional for the subject.

Says writer and critic Joseph Wood Krutch, “‘The magazines are full of articles dealing statistically with, for example, the alleged failure or success of marriage,’ but, ‘one man’s familiar essay on love and marriage might get close to some all-important realities than any number of studies could’” (Klaus pg. 8) Because the form is comprised of successive notes revisited, and the style reflects thought patterns, the reader effectively gets a better sense for the subjective experience of actually owning and using a notebook, than they would otherwise get from theoretical writing with an academic structure. Some inherently subjective subjects can only be effectively communicated with subjective writing, and the subsequent identification of the audience.