The German American artist Eva Hesse kept meticulous diaries throughout the late sixties and seventies that account for both her personal and professional anxieties, her creative process and experiments in sculpture, her failed marriage, the brief thoughts she transcribed in passing, and the social calendar she kept until a brain tumor killed her in 1970 at a mere thirty-four years old. In 2016, Yale University Press and Hauser & Wirth, the gallery that represents the late artist’s estate, published her diaries. The tome, which resembles a brick, illuminates the life and professional practice of an artist who was previously an enigma due to the brevity of her life and career.
Hesse—and her legacy—is also the reason the editor David Richardson and I first met. For years Richardson and our friend Sal Randolph operated the publishing project dispersed holdings out of Hesse’s former apartment on the Bowery. When their lease expired, Richardson and the curator Vanessa Kowalski invited me to make an audio recording of my own diaries as an homage to the late artist, to install via an iPod and speaker hidden in the cupboard of Hesse’s former bathroom. I began writing entries in 2013 and continued them well into the COVID-19 pandemic. Like Eva’s hefty tome, my recording runs seven hours, though I doubt anyone hung around long enough to listen to more than a fraction of the whole thing. The exhibition was in 2017, and it remains one of the only times my diaries were ever shown to the public before they were lost.
Curators tasked with maintaining Hesse’s sculptures today struggle to conserve works made of materials that deteriorate and fall apart, much like human bodies inevitably do. Writers anticipate similar hindrances when working manually too: paper can burn, get wet, disappear, bleed through. Hesse’s experiments with latex fifty years ago are complemented by her own awareness of her finite biology, as evidenced by the diaries she kept. “Why don’t I get well?” she wonders at length. The pieces she constructed at the time of her diagnosis and after also resemble the organic processes of decay and disintegration she experienced in health. In 1969, she composed Right After using fiberglass, a durable material stronger than most metals, yet the work appears delicate and fragile to the untrained eye, more akin to a tangled net or a freshly woven spiderweb. Contingent, crafted that same year, evokes the appearance of strips of gauze extracted from a pussing wound, and No Title (1970), a large-scale sculpture composed of latex, rope, string, and wire held in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, is one of the last pieces she worked on before her death; the work approximates spindles of cerumen.
“Life doesn’t last, art doesn’t last,” Hesse is famously quoted as saying, perhaps in resignation to the inevitability of her own work’s demise. Yet in other entries in her diaries she resists the prospect of decline and is distressed about the prospect of failure. In a letter to Sol Lewitt: “The work is ruined!” she laments. (Disaster!) In another, she is confident, elated: “I must be totally engrossed in my own work, it is the only thing that is permanent, matures and is lasting.”
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The last time I visited New York, in March 2022, Richardson called to talk about my diaries. We do this once a year. He tells me he wants to publish the whole set, and when I’m not too manic or depressed to remember just how pleased a byline makes me, I call to remind him of what he said, and together we entertain the possibility of actually seeing the project through. These fifteen or so handwritten books chronicle the most formative years of my life, are the basis of our friendship, and remain my only real long-form project. The diaries are what has kept my writing life “in progress” over the past ten years when pitches do not land and stories that once seemed exciting to write begin to bore me and it feels, for a moment, that I might never publish again.
We really should get going if we’re going to do this, we both agree. But the year passes—there are bills to pay, afternoons spent on hold with elevator music, a pile of speeding tickets to diminish—and still the published book remains unrealized, mere fantasy.
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What does last when material gives way? Legacy; one’s reputation. Google images. Essays that examine the work in question; the revulsion one feels when one thinks about one’s inevitable rot and decay, of illness and human bodies; the tight, itchy sensation of latex against human skin; a woman’s handwriting; preference. The fact that memory fails, and time gets away from us. A diary that functions as a map of a lonely woman’s wanderings from a bed and back into it.
Lauren Stroh’s diaries, courtesy of the author.
More women keep diaries than men, I suspect. This genre of writing is often consigned to the realm of minor literature and is seldom published unless it accompanies a larger body of work of literary, artistic, or historical significance. Unrecognized labor is labor women are accustomed to; after eons of relegation to the “second sex,” women are only now publishing more regularly than men. In years prior, however, if one could not publish, the act of keeping a diary granted its author a sense of agency over the narrative form one’s life takes, differing drastically from the offerings of straight journalism, poetry, and prose. Diaries resist coherent portraiture, the male gaze, reduction, even death.
Perhaps women keep diaries because they allow us the opportunity to examine what is true, to keep secrets to which others are not privy, to acknowledge what matters to someone who accounts for themselves, what triggers the desire to mark up a page: the experience of passion, incendiary emotion, revelation. They encourage embarrassing sentimentality where other genres do not; they are girlish; there is the expectation that the woman who writes one must be hysterical, unmade, mad and made madder—all precisely the behavior words first-wave feminists sought to distance themselves from. But some women very well may be mad, some hysterical, some unmade. Diaries grant us the chance to transcend larger political schemes in order to examine what is true for the individual, while acknowledging this truth is still relative and subject to revision and cultural criticism too.
Diaries are often where writers first encounter their language. My own have been my most constant and regular companion; they predate my career, they constitute a project I once referred to, in earnest, as the work of my life.
Lauren Stroh’s diaries, courtesy of the author.
Some years I barely write at all. Because I am the type of writer who works with ease for a spell and must sit out the next two (incoherence, paranoia, psychosis, depression, burnout, mixed episodes), keeping a diary has been productive for me—if I cannot write a single essay fit for publication during a difficult episode, at least I can write a few sentences that might lead me to an essay later on. I agree with the word conviction, and I believe in accountability. I see my diaries as a responsibility, a necessary part of a professional writing practice that I maneuver alongside the contract negotiations and tax deductions I am expected to keep up with.
These diaries are the only accurate record I have of the past decade of my life. It is impossible for anyone to recover the memories that correspond to the same time period without them. I choose to live alone (I have no witness). Writing them kept me coherent when nothing else did; they gave cadence to an otherwise disorganized lifestyle. If I am a woman looking in a mirror, they are the glance I take in passing before I offer my reflection to the world, that flicker of recognition: will you take me as I am, for what I have to offer you?
And now I cannot find the books. I have looked and waited and hoped for their return to me. I moved again a year ago after a manic-depressive event and likely threw them out by accident in a cognitive fugue I eventually identify as a bipolar blackout, in which one loses one’s memory and critical-thinking skills for weeks, even months, at a time. I was confined to a hospital in this episode; pre-intervention I can’t have left my bed for six months. My memory of the two years before the one I am writing is skeletal at best. Perhaps the books were stolen, or they got lost in the shuffle of transporting and giving away unwanted furniture (that I later realized I needed and now must rebuy), or they were taken out by the downstairs neighbor moving out around the same time as me, who took my contact information but never called like they said they were going to. The work is ruined! What is one to do?
I am sick—nothing. Life happens the way it is intended to. I believe in kismet; I believe in fate. Still, I do not believe in a higher purpose to this essay than to write it, no silver lining in the illness, no hopeful resolution that the tragedy parlays. The material will not survive.
I find myself bargaining: if I had done something—anything—differently, perhaps I would be on the phone today with this editor or writing a different essay for that publication’s front matter, something I now will never do. It is what I would have preferred. I want to throw a fit every time I think about my “missed opportunity.” It is the work of my life. I feel anger, regret, embarrassment over my carelessness and the effort’s futility. I feel as if I will never write again; I know I will, am writing now. I know I must accept the forward movement of time, the record lost, the reality of life’s impermanence, and that I desire to honor the diary’s purpose by resisting these notions too. What is left over are a bundle of contradictions; that the diaries do not last, yet the memory of them, and my attachment to them, will and continues to.
Lauren Stroh’s diaries, courtesy of the author.
I would have preferred a funeral, Catholic, a black mantilla and a shift—something sensible and understated—to sit shiva (like Eva, I am a Jew).
Without the diaries I handle myself like a woman, anonymous, who has been stripped of her name and her citizenship papers and any real history she had to speak of, an exiled citizen of my own imaginary world, born anew to grief—what’s left over is the fact of my body, my moods from moment to moment, what I see in front of me and whatever sense I can make of it, the difference between writing for me and writing now, carefully, to you.
I understand the futility of the archive if no one else sees the work protected. I will not recover (the prognosis of my bipolar disorder is slim; there is always the possibility of another debilitating episode; I must cope with this fact, as well as with the loss of my work). I am comforted that their disappearance only relieves me of the record I have of a past life I have since abandoned. Still, their loss does not resolve. What is one to do?
Similarly, in the shorthand Hesse used to compose her own record, we also witness her come into a certain understanding of herself and the significance of her work, despite her inability to maintain her practice in her final months. At the conclusion of Hesse’s Diaries, toward the end of her life, she writes:
I was ready to get with it, I was trying, beginning and love it so. Then a chemical change started the pendulum another way. It slowed down the action took me off a chemically produced high and I began to lie. It is now lying all the time. eleven days in bed so far with the exception of hospital visits . . .
If I could go back
to the beginning
where it all began
I was at Donald’s
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Ten months ago, when I began this essay, I wrote:
I have begun dreaming of [the diaries]; in one I am working at my desk and happen to glance over to the right. I notice the white plastic accordion-fold cover of my favorite, it is unmistakable—I have simply overlooked the two most important; the others become sacrificial offerings, or fate editing the historical record the way I myself once hoped to. In others, I set out to do the transcription work I was commissioned, and I begin to weep once I remember they are lost again. This is when I come to.
Today I no longer feel the same grief about my diaries’ departure from me the way that I did then; they are no longer a looming specter that haunts my night terrors, or even what I might consider the work of my life. In recent months I have not dreamed at all, and I have yet to resume the habit of keeping diaries.
Life doesn’t last; art doesn’t last—perhaps only the changing of the moods.
