Journal of a Solitude: Sarton’s bestselling memoir chronicles a solitary year spent at the house she bought and renovated in the quiet village of Nelson, New Hampshire. This extraordinary volume collects three of her most beloved works. In a long life spent recording her personal observations, poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton redefined the journal as a literary form. In not waiting for “the moment,” you know, but saying: “I’m going to write every day for two or three hours.Now in one volume: Three exquisite meditations on nature, healing, and the pleasures of the solitary life from a New York Times–bestselling author. I think the great thing he gave me was an example of what steady work, disciplined work, can finally produce.
INTERVIEWER: Have you pretty much stuck to the same kind of discipline over the years? SARTON: I do all my work before eleven in the morning. INTERVIEWER: Everyone wants to know about a writer’s work habits. I also found that by keeping a journal I was looking at things in a new way because I would think, “That-good! That will be great in the journal.” So it took me out of myself, out of the depression to some extent. If you just indulge in nothing but moaning, it wouldn’t be a good journal for others to read. It keeps you on your toes stylistically and prevents too much self-pity, knowing that it’s going to be read and that it will provide a certain standard for other people who are living isolated lives and who are depressed. SARTON: I wrote the first one, Journal of a Solitude, as an exercise to handle a serious depression and it worked quite well. INTERVIEWER: How was it that you began to write the journals? Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and the house and I resume old conversations Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. That’s what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life, unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my ‘real’ life again at last. I look out on the maple, where few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself, and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. She had written memoirs previously, but turned to journal writing in a quest for “a more immediate, less controlled record of life.” Journal of a Solitude:īegin here. May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude was first published in 1973.
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