Five Teenage Diaries Explored in Girlhood Studies Column

Claire Marie Healy's fourth installment of Girlhood Studies, titled 'Primary Sources,' examines teenage diaries as unfiltered records of coming-of-age. Healy, who never kept a diary herself, contrasts her own digital ephemera with published adolescent journals. She discusses the unsettling nature of reading published diaries, citing Anne Frank's as a prime example of ethical debates around posthumous publication. Healy argues that many authors find more truth in fragmented memoirs than verbatim diaries. The column reviews five books: bell hooks' 'Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood,' which reconstructs growing up Black and female in the South using shifting perspectives; Annie Ernaux's 'A Girl's Story,' investigating a 1958 sexual experience at a Normandy holiday camp, adapted into a film by Judith Godrèche that premiered at Cannes; Simone de Beauvoir's 'Diary of a Philosophy Student' (1926–30) and 'Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter' (1958), together covering her intellectual and emotional development, including meetings with Simone Weil and Jean-Paul Sartre; Susan Sontag's 'Reborn: Early Diaries 1947–1963,' published by her son David Rieff, capturing teenage intensity and self-contradiction; and Ann Rower's 'If You're a Girl: Selected Stories 1985-2023,' a layered collection of auto-fictive vignettes from the NY cult figure, originally published in 1991 and expanded in 2024, which recovers an archive of her younger self after the death of her first love Margot in 2021.