ABSTRACT For the past few years, I’ve been seeking out books that frustrate many readers—and sometimes myself among them. They are frequently described as sketchy, short, fragmented, diaristic—when the reader is being kind—and lazy, boring, or pointless when she is not. The official category (on the back of the book, right above the ISBN) sometimes reads Poetry, sometimes Novel, sometimes Memoir, sometimes Essay—or, sometimes Essay/Poetry or Essay/Literature. Some of the more famous examples include Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. In this essay, I will propose and define a new genre in contemporary literature: the lyric diary—a slender volume in which a depressed, middle-age, female first-person narrator records the mundane experiences of her everyday life alongside facts, ideas, and quotations in flat, affectless ‘shreds’ of prose. Blending elements of the confessional poem with the diary and other non-literary modes of historical women’s writing, the lyric diary rejects plot and the narrative arc for the lyric’s associative logic and the diary’s serial, episodic movement. The lyric diarist does not narrate: she records. It is all that she, exhausted from working the double shift, can manage to do.
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