Curated transcription. The curator here is Alexander Masters, author of A Discarded Life, based on 148 diaries found in a skip in Cambridge in 2001. The diary-writer was Laura Francis, live-in companion and servant for an elderly professor. Masters on Francis: “Laura could be an excellent diarist but frequently wasn’t … Her writing is repetitive, self-obsessed, confused, and two millimeters high.” But: “Even when the diaries are agonizingly tedious, you want to go on reading them because they are true. There’s none of the story-teller’s fraudulent scene-setting, character development, points of conflict, concluding resolution. You are peering in on a real woman who thinks she is alone – a woman in the final stages of tedium. She is writing about being human: the arbitrariness, the impotence, the fog.”

For The Paris Review, Masters arranged selected diary entries on specific subjects into ‘found stories’. The trousers one is hilarious. Some entries from another selection:

Various dates, 1959:

E said I’m very small, not interested in the world.

E said she didn’t believe in any of my gifts, not even writing.

E said I am stupid.

E said my song-capacity nothing, just a manifestation of the sexual impulse, like the singing of the birds.

July 23rd: Sat with the flickering lights in the leaves of trees playing in the hall, and thought thoughts that weren’t thoughts.

Aug: A desperate need for E; if E would have nothing more to do with me, I’d have nothing more to live for – would go ‘off my rocker’, or commit suicide. Almost feel I HATE E.

Published in The Paris Review, Summer 2017; available online to subscribers