Thirty - Jill Emerson [0]
Lawrence Block
Writing as Jill Emerson
Contents
January 7
January 8
January 12
January 14
January 19
January 20
January 23
January 24
January 27
February 2
February 17
February 20
February 21
February 25
February 27
February 28
March 1
March 2
March 3
March 5
March 6
March 15
March 16
March 17
March 23
March 24
March 27
March 28
March 29
April 2
April 3
April 6
April 10
April 11
April 12
April 13
April 19
April 20
April 24
April 27
May 1
May 5
May 7
May 9
May 12
May 14
May 15
May 16
May 19
May 20
May 27
June 14
June 15
June 21
June 24
June 27
June 30
July 3
July 7
July 8
July 9
July 11
July 15
July 17
July 18
July 24
July 29
August 9
August 11
August 17
August 22
August 25
August 29
September 1
September 4
September 6
September 9
September 12
September 23
October 2
October 12
January 5
A New Afterword by the Author
A Biography of Lawrence Block
January 7
How confusing!
The trouble with a diary is that you have to decide who you are writing it to. (I mean to whom you are writing it. No, I don’t. I mean what I said. If this is going to work at all, I’d be well advised to write as I talk. Which is not a matter of dese and dem and dose, because I am after all a literate and wordsworthy person, acknowledged to be fairly bright for a lady. But there is no point, in these pages, being a nut about grammatical perfection. Or sitting around hung up over the spelling of a word.)
Interesting, though, that the Personal Diary of Jan Giddings Kurland should begin How confusing. Interesting. Curiouser and Curiouser . . .
My lawyers. Curiouser and Curiouser, Attorneys-at-Law.
Confusing because I’ve been spending the morning and much of the afternoon pacing around trying to figure out how to start this. What tone to take. Whether to begin each entry “Dear Diary” as girls do in books—and thus probably in real life as well, life imitating bad art as it does. Or whether to write each day’s entry as if to Howie, if for no better reason than that the sneak will probably read this sooner or later anyway, and that if each entry began “Dear Howie” he could do so with a somewhat clearer conscience, assuming, that is, that conscience is still a valid concept while discussing Howie, that his has not atrophied from lack of use, like a nun’s cunt.
Howie is Howard Kurland, my husband. I am Janet Kurland, the former Janet Giddings. Howie is thirty-two. He is tall, he has brown hair, his eyes are also brown, he—
No, impossible. I cannot get hung up on things like that or this book will never get anywhere.
It’s probably too late anyway. The year is already a week old. The night before last was Twelfth Night. We put the Christmas tree out for the garbage. As it was, we had waited a little too long, but I’m a traditionalist. Every year when Twelfth Night comes we take out the mangy old Christmas tree, and I open my birthday presents! Christmas is officially over and I’m officially a year older.
When I was a girl (I don’t like that sentence, I mean phrase, I don’t like that phrase, not at all, the ring of it, the echo of an old woman’s voice speaking those words, I am still a girl, I want still to be a girl, twenty-nine is not that old, twenty-nine too old, twenty-nine years, my thirtieth year, God!). When I was younger (cheat!) it balanced off, Twelfth Night and birthday, because the end of Christmas was sorrowful, in a way, but the happiness of a birthday made up for it. Well, it still balances, but the other way around. I was glad to get that broken-down tree out of the house, glad to see Christmas over for a year, no more decorations all over the neighborhood, no more of the forced hilarity of the holiday season.
Being twenty-nine, having embarked on one’s thirtieth year, on the other hand, was the greatest drag imaginable.
So. I don’t keep diaries. I’m not good at it, I start off all ambitious (like everything else) and by the end of January I don’t want to be bothered with the job of recording each day’s trivia, and sometime in mid-February