Valerie Schultz: All girls should have a blank canvas
| Wednesday, Oct 28 2009 08:07 PM
Last Updated Wednesday, Oct 28 2009 09:53 PM
When my daughter was organizing and packing her things before moving to Portland, I noticed a large box in the corner full of notebooks. "What are those?" I asked, thinking they were old school assignments that she might not want to keep. "Those are my journals," she said.
"All of those are journals?" I asked.
"I write a lot," she said, looking at me as if I, of all people, should get that. "I always have."
I was impressed by her prolific output. I suppose I could fill a box with my journals, but I certainly couldn't have at her age. I did not take my writing seriously until I was close to 30. Before that, I thought of it as a self-indulgent hobby that I had better keep private: as a writer, I wasted a lot of time. I also destroyed the diaries I filled when I was young, because they just seemed too incriminating. I will always regret that.
I am so glad my daughters have not made the same mistake with their written words. I know they have all held onto journals from when they were growing up, and I have encouraged them to treasure the jewels of insight and empathy their early writings will bring to them when they are mothers.
Girls who keep diaries, my younger self included, have likely been inspired by reading the work of the teenager Anne Frank. And how lucky the world is that Anne did not destroy her own writing. In the pages of her immortal diary, Anne chronicled and pondered her life as she and her family endured the Holocaust. She recorded her daily entries from the "secret annex" of the house in Amsterdam where friends bravely hid her family from harm. Anne herself was destroyed by the Nazis, dying at the age of 15 from typhus, which she caught while imprisoned in the abhorrent conditions in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. But her journals were preserved. At war's end, they were edited and published posthumously by her father, who was the only member of the family to survive the horror of World War II and Hitler's attempted genocide of the Jews. Anne's only book appeared in 1947 under the title "Het Achterhuis" ("The Secret Annex"). The English translation in 1952 was called "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl."
A new book by Francine Prose, titled "Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife," discusses Anne's extant writing both as iconic inspiration and as serious literature. Anne Frank has sometimes been dismissed as a breathless teenager whose work only has worth because of the tragic circumstances under which it was written, but Prose believes otherwise. Prose writes that Anne's diary "should be awarded its place among the great memoirs and spiritual confessions" of all time.
Anne could probably not have imagined the impact the publication of her diary would have on the world of literature and of adolescence, or that she would become the role model for journal-keepers everywhere. Still, she aspired to be a writer when she grew up, and Prose's study, of both published and unpublished excerpts of Anne's outpourings, is illuminating. She shows that Anne's diary, which was her confidante and emotional outlet at a terrible time of her life, was also rewritten and revised by a surprisingly mature and technically adept writer. At 15, Anne rewrote the entries she had written as a 13-year-old. She revised and refined them with a critical eye towards her potential readership. She knew, as do all writers, that the real work (and joy) of writing is found in the constant, ever-changing rewriting.
"Anyone who doesn't write doesn't know how wonderful it is," Anne noted, a statement with which writers everywhere can identify. Writing clears the mind and cleanses the soul. Our words on a page bring us face to face with our essence, which can be a harsh realization and/or a moving revelation. The act of writing can be enlightening and/or maddening, but it is rarely boring.
The legacy of Anne Frank's writing is to reassure girls everywhere that their thoughts and impressions and records of life are universally meaningful. Girls are often made to believe that they are silly, flighty, inconsequential, even ridiculous beings in transition: nothing more than the stereotypical, air-headed Valley Girl. At worst, in some societies, girls are still considered expendable; they are treated as property to be owned rather than human beings deserving of full and equal rights.
Prose notes drily that teenage girls are "not a demographic we commonly associate with literary genius." But Anne Frank's writing demonstrates, speaking through translations into dozens of languages, that the written, authentic experiences and opinions of girls not only matter, but can be profound and literarily dazzling. Every girl should be encouraged to write. Every girl should be given, like Anne was, a blank book full of brilliant potential. She will know herself better and honor herself more. With practice, she may even touch the heart of the whole world.
