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Match Book

Aspiring Memoirist Seeking Famous Writers’ Letters and Essays for Inspiration

Credit...Joon Mo Kang

Dear Match Book,

I love autobiographical work by writers in the form of diaries, notebooks or journals, and find I usually prefer work that has been edited by the author for publication. I enjoyed “Time Out of Mind,” by Leonard Michaels, and Charles Simic’s “The Monster Loves His Labyrinth.” May Sarton’s “Journal of a Solitude” is one of my all-time favorites. More recently, I’ve read Sarah Manguso’s “Ongoingness” and Heidi Julavits’s “The Folded Clock.”

Straight memoir or autobiography can work for me too if it favors anecdote and the prose is condensed, probably since that way of telling stories strikes me as more true to the way we remember. Examples include Paula Fox’s great, ridiculously underrated memoir “The Coldest Winter,” and all of Annie Ernaux’s work, particularly “A Woman’s Story.” I think I also tend to like prose that works off close observation, rather than journeys into the interior (Sarton being an exception, because she was exceptionally good at it).

I’m a university librarian and a writer working on a memoir in the style I’ve described. What I’m looking for are books that will inspire my own personal history.

PAUL ABRUZZO
RHINEBECK, N.Y.

Dear Paul,

One particular pleasure in writers’ journals lies in a sly duality: Readers may feel a voyeuristic thrill while uncovering someone’s most private thoughts, but the act of keeping a diary, especially when the journal-keeper is a writer, turns out to be a performative act. Even in his or her most unguarded moments, a diarist remains constantly aware of the future readers whose eyes may one day fall on the pages. As a result, intimate thoughts can often be carefully crafted.

Secret Selves

The first three books that came to mind will (I hope!) offer meta-inspiration for your own self-reflective projects. In “The Hidden Writer,” Alexandra Johnson considers, with uncommon sensitivity and immersive storytelling, the ways in which the work of seven diarists — including the celebrated early-19th-century 7-year-old Scottish prodigy (and poor speller) Marjory Fleming; Henry and William James’s famous, sharp sister, Alice; and the expatriate New Zealander and modernist writer Katherine Mansfield — functions as “the first draft of creative identity.” The sections are artfully composed to track the developmental arc of a writer’s life, but it’s the diarists’ own words that make the book sing.

“A Book of One’s Own,” Thomas Mallon’s survey of the form, likewise includes the work of famous writers, among them Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin, but it also contains anonymous ones. A sampling from each promises to send you into the stacks, seeking out those whose voices call to you.

The title of Yiyun Li’s memoir-in-essays, “Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life,” may be borrowed from one of Mansfield’s journal entries, but her book takes a distinctly inward turn. In her moving and emotionally lucid account of the hospitalizations that followed her suicide attempts, she looks to literature to tether herself to life and to keep her company during her darkest hours.

By contrast, my next suggestion falls squarely within the confines of traditional journals. “The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965,” edited by her biographer, Tim Page, is as witty and sardonic as Powell’s satirical novels. It is also filled with gossipy details about her literary friends in New York (Dorothy Parker, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson among them), mundane details of her daily life, notes for fiction and tender, heartbreaking entries about her disabled son, Jojo.

This Be the Verse

Your affection for Charles Simic’s epigrammatic gems put me in mind of the uncategorizable work of a clutch of poets and an essayist-novelist whose distillations of experience and philosophical style match the tone and structure of diary entries, even if their work does not strictly adhere to the genre.

Among the everyday and unearthly mix of prose poems in Mary Ruefle’s “The Most of It” is a witty remembrance called “The Diary,” about a girl’s childhood with her family on an unusual farm with a barn full of books that need tending.

In Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely,” diagrams, photographs and drawings illustrate prose poems that reckon with public and private tragedies in American life. Images and fragments also appear alongside the text in “Nox,” the poet and classicist Anne Carson’s intricately constructed illuminated manuscript in memory of her brother.

Then there is Elizabeth Hardwick’s almost-novel “Sleepless Nights,” which mixes truth and fiction in diarylike fragments; her meditations on memory and literary and daily life will light the way toward your own creative path.

Yours truly,
Match Book

Do you need book recommendations? Write to matchbook@nytimes.com.

Check out Match Book’s earlier recommendations here.

Nicole Lamy is a writer and book critic, and the former books editor of The Boston Globe. Follow her on Twitter @NicoleALamy.

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