The Truth in the Lie or the Lie in the Truth: A Writer’s Childhood Diaries

In my debut novel, SECRETS OF SOUTHERN GIRLS, the reader gets an up-close and wildly personal look at Reba’s life via her diary. It’s the one place where she can confess the many secrets she is too afraid to share with anyone else. That’s the purpose of a diary, isn’t it?

I understand the allure of a journal. I have boxes and boxes of old diaries that I kept when I was an adolescent and teenager. Some of them are simple notebooks, some are elaborately decorated (I was partial to Lisa Frank), and some of them have cutesy brass locks that make them appear impenetrable. I loved the idea of keeping a diary. My favorite book and TV characters documented their lives that way, and that meant I should, too.  I went through phases where I was compulsive in my dedication to journal-writing, before my interest inevitably fizzled out.

But, instead of containing my innermost thoughts or even the casual events of the day, my own diaries are filled with exaggerations, half-truths, and sometimes big, bold, brazen lies.

The definition of a diary is a book in which one keeps a daily record of events and experiences. Nowhere does it say that what’s written must be true. And yet, we always assume that the details recorded in diaries are accurate ones. Unless there’s an elaborate ulterior motive (Amy’s from Gone Girl comes to mind), lying in one’s own diary doesn’t even make sense.

Let’s just say that I was no Amy Dunne. There was no malice in my lies. I didn’t actually know anyone else in real life who kept a diary, so I didn’t know what I was supposed to write. I didn’t know if it was normal to embellish. I liked disappearing into my diary for hours at a time, and I tried to tell the truth. Things usually started out true enough, but after a few sentences, reality (as I documented it, at least) started to become a bit more…fluid. Sometimes I didn’t even realize, in the moment, that I was straying from the facts.

I reimagined myself in dozens of different ways: some days I was the most popular girl in school, some days I was the quiet genius, some days I played the lead role in a storyline I’d lifted straight from the pages of The Babysitters Club. I wasn’t unhappy with my life. I just recognized that the details of any given day could be enhanced, and that I could enhance those details myself with only my imagination and a pastel-colored gel pen. Even when I was a teenager and well past my chapter book days, I still found myself rewriting each experience I had into whatever I wanted it to be, making drama where there was none and twisting teenage crushes into great loves within the confines of the journal pages.

What does it mean that I created these alternate worlds in my own diary, with no reader beyond myself? Was I a compulsive liar? I was generally honest when there was no pen in my hand. Looking back, I think it means I was a writer before I realized there was a name for it. Before I sat at a desk and wrote stories with intent, I wrote them for myself in the form of journal entries.

I also wrote them for a mysterious imaginary audience I had yet to meet. Most people who keep diaries have a deep fear of someone else reading it; in my case, I had a recurring fantasy of people doing exactly that. These mythical “someones” were in the distant future, archaeologists perhaps, looking back with fascination (naturally) at the life of a young girl. What was she like? They would wonder, and they would be drawn in by my exciting life. Never mind that my real life was mostly uneventful.

Maybe this fantasy is how the idea of my main character, Julie, finding Reba’s diary a decade later came to me so organically in SECRETS OF SOUTHERN GIRLS. Like the reader (and like that imaginary audience of mine), Julie is a voyeur into Reba’s life, finally learning the secrets of her childhood best friend ten years too late.

Of course, the distant reader of my own diaries turned out not to be an archaeologist but me: an older (hopefully wiser) version with insider knowledge, who knows the truth of my childhood hidden within those silly stories and who sees imagination there instead of deception, but who also knows that the entry about being a secret princess from a royal family is just another big fat lie.

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About Secrets Of Southern Girls
Ten years ago, Julie Portland accidentally killed her best friend, Reba. What’s worse is she got away with it. Consumed by guilt, she left the small town of Lawrence Mill, Mississippi, and swore nothing would ever drag her back.

Now, raising her daughter and struggling to make ends meet in Manhattan, Julie still can’t forget the ghost of a girl with golden hair and a dangerous secret.

When August, Reba’s first love, begs Julie to come home to find the diary that Reba kept all those years ago, Julie’s past comes creeping back to haunt her. That diary could expose the shameful memories Julie has been running from, but it could also unearth the hidden truths that Reba left buried…and reveal that Julie isn’t the only one who feels responsible for Reba’s death.

In fact, she may not be responsible for it at all.

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Haley Harrigan graduated from the University of Georgia with degrees in creative writing and public relations. She lives in Athens, Georgia, with her husband. Secrets of Southern Girls is her debut.  For more information, visit www.haleyharrigan.com.

 

Category: On Writing