Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” describes the importance of writing as often as possible, but also, describes the way in which her thoughts formed on paper as a child as well as adult. This idea can be reflected in Klaus’ “Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay,” in that he believes the true role and significance of the essay is to allow the reader inside the mind of the writer. The two would agree that the way in which one reaches an understanding of the author’s mind  is much less about reading facts that they can regurgitate on paper, but rather, it is about reading the things that the author has created. In Notebook, Didion describes an interaction with her family in which the memories that she had were not the same as her families (3).  She therefore concludes that the imagined passages in a notebook or event are not about what it was like but rather, “How it felt,” to her (3). Similarly, Klaus would argue that when the author is only concerned with facts and figures, “it allowed no room for the personal experience, personal thought, or personal voice of the essayist,” and is “out of touch with human concerns”(xix). Furthermore, the two author’s are interested in the essay as a sort of study of oneself. Didion admits that her constant documentation of seemingly worthless facts is actually important because she tries to “Remember what it was to be me” (4). In society, we are expected to abandon our wants, and emotional states for the benefit of the other people in which we encounter. Didion, however, believes that this abandonment is impossible and it is through the notebook, that we are able to regain what has been lost “our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I”…we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker”(10). Klaus’ would agree with Didion that the essay explores the mind of the essayist. He quotes Hoagland, stating that “because essays are directly concerned with the mind and the mind’s idiosyncrasy, the very freedom the mind possesses is bestowed on this branch of literature that does honor to it, and the fascination of the mind is the fascination of the essay” (xxi).