Joan Didion’s essay opens on an incredibly personal note: a confession of sorts of why she and who the reader assumes to be her significant other, broke up. It’s a snapshot of her life at a single moment in time; a single sentence accompanied by the date and where Didion was when she wrote it. The reader is left with questions Didion goes on to ask her. What was she doing in Delaware? “Waiting for a train, missing a train?” As Carl H. Klaus points out in his piece “Essayists on the Essay,” Didion’s essay is personal, free, and unfolds slowly and in a way that mimics how she is processing the information she’s writing about.
Didion goes on to answer a broader question: why keep a notebook? The way she answers this questions, however, reflects the characteristics of the essay that Klaus talks about. Didion could have made this piece a persuasive one, where she talks about the reasons people should keep a notebook or she could have made it more like an article where she writes about the benefits of keeping a notebook. Instead, she answers the questions as she’s mulling it over herself. The essay isn’t set up in a way that is a purposeful, methodical exploration of the subject, it’s simply an exploration of her thoughts.
After listing off some potential personal reasons for keeping a notebook, Didion seems to reach a conclusion. She says, “So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking.” The way she writes makes it seem as though she came to this conclusion through writing about it. It wasn’t an answer she found by thinking about it beforehand and then deciding to write it down, but instead by working through it with words and internal musings.
This is one of the main distinctions Klaus makes between an article and an essay. He says there is a “personal orientation of the essay and the factual mode of the article.” He goes on to say the article is “out of touch with human concerns.”
The driving force behind Didion’s piece “On Keeping a Notebook” is her voice and personal connection throughout. The narrative is freer, more open, and consists more of impressions and thoughts than fact. It is this personal voice and casual exploration of why she chooses to keep a notebook that is one of the defining traits of an essay that Klaus explains in his piece.