Forty-one notebooks. Three decades of mornings. Last Tuesday I carried them — in two canvas bags, heavier than they look — into the City Archive, where they will be catalogued, conserved, and opened to any reader who asks.
People keep asking whether it felt like giving something away. It felt like the opposite: like shelving groceries where the neighbors can reach them. The notebooks were never really private; every book I have published is just the notebook with the boring parts removed. Now students, scholars, and the simply curious can see the boring parts too — the crossed-out openings, the weather complaints, the lists of birds.
“A draft is a letter to a future stranger. I have simply decided to post mine early.”
The reading room will host a small exhibition this autumn: open notebooks under glass, first pages beside finished pages, and the famous 2009 entry that is nothing but the sentence “the heron again” written eleven times. I am told school groups are already booked. Nothing I have written has pleased me more.
If you visit, ask for notebook nineteen. It has the best margins.
Eleanor Ashgrove
Novelist & essayist. On notebook forty-two.