“I suppose,” and “although” are among an essayist’s favorite words. They signify an ambling of the mind, a sort of signifier that the writer is actively thinking.

In Joan Didion’s On Keeping a Notebook, she wonders why notebooks are kept. “I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle,” she begins.  Then clarifies, “although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old…” (22) because as she was writing this essay, she must have noticed that while a writer’s thoughts may well begin in the cradle, no infant would have use for a notebook.

Her essay is full of little quips and backtracks as she recalls different entries in her notebook, the “naps on a piece of wool” (xix) that Klaus mentions Krutch talking about in Essayists on the Essay. Those “naps” were once described to me by an old professor as “river teeth,” eddies and bits of old logs that can catch you as you travel down a river. Her essay is full of personality, her “personal experience, personal thought, …personal voice” (xix).

Aldous Huxley would call these stories that arise from notebook sketches “personal and auto-biographical,” (xxi) but as Didion herself points out, “[she tells] what some would call lies” (23). So I suppose it isn’t necessarily entirely autobiographical, since biographies are generally regarded as true; rather, these bits of autobiographical naps are woven into a tapestry, and some extra thread is needed to keep them all together.

Klaus talks about this as a relationship between personality and the meditative process:

the persona or personality giving direction to the meditative process and the meditative process in turn revealing the most distinctive aspects of personality. But as essayists define personality, it seems to refer to a public or exterior aspect of self, something that one can put on and take off as easily as if it were a “costume” or “garb” or “shirt,” whereas a meditative process is centered in one’s mind or consciousness and thus involves the most private and interior aspect of one’s self. Paradoxically, then, essayists apparently conceive of the essay as embodying a multistable impression of the self, in the process of thought and in the process of sharing thought with others. (xxv-xxvi)

Didion is both being herself and acting as something else at the same time. Didion has to lie about the things that have happened to her in order to tell the story she wants to tell, and in order to reveal the truths about herself that she needs to.