Pieve Santo Stefano is called the “City of the Diary,” Citta Del Diario, and is about an hour and a half by car from Siena, in Tuscany. I’m going there because, in these years of returning to graduate school for creative nonfiction, I’ve found myself drawn again and again to the diary as a way of writing a life. I’ve wondered if a diary is the book that never got written, something between books, underneath our books, a book the market cannot sell because our lives aren’t organized neatly by theme and chapter. Unlike the process of memoir making, which Maggie Nelson refers to as a “lasso” around specific events and their significance (and as I would add, a horizontal lasso cutting across time), diaries are vertical piles of information with no organizing principle save chronology and that too is precarious, as details and meaning topple messily into the next day and the next.
The earliest entry in my own diary is from December 1984, when I was 11 years old. I’d arrived in America two years back, too young to call it a choice, or even claim it as my own immigrant story. After my mother died, my father brought me to New York because he’d gotten remarried to a woman who lived here. The time from the day my father and future stepmother met to the day I was dropped into a new world (and a new life, 3,000 miles from home, with a grandmother who raised me like a mother) was just six months.
And then just a year later, we’d moved again–this time to a new school district on Long Island. I’d just started 6th grade, and no one knew me. I hadn’t yet met the friends who, only a few months later, would become lifelong companions. In this first diary, which I covered in red and green Christmas gift wrap, I write in embarrassing-to-me-now sing-song prose:
“Christmas means so much to me,
love, caring and family.
But most of them are across the sea.
So I cannot be with them on Christmas Eve.”
Across is spelled wrong–accross. Two years later, I’ll go on to win the New York State regional spelling bee and have a plaque with my name on it on the walls of my American middle school. But right now, I’m nobody.
Was the reason I started this diary to stop feeling alone and invisible? Or was it to slow things down and absorb what I couldn’t absorb in real life because of the sheer pace of change? Did everyone do this?
The reasons aren’t singular, and they’ve shifted over the years, yet I never let go of the practice of keeping a diary. And then 40 years went by. Now there are crates and crates of notebooks of every size and pattern documenting almost all the months of my life. I’ve come to realize that no, not everyone does this. But I still didn’t know what the practice really meant.
*
The museum in Pieve Santo Stefano that gives the town its moniker is called the “Piccolo Museo Del Diario.” A sign in Italian explains how the city was bombed in WWII, and almost all the buildings were turned to rubble, or were severely damaged, except for one. But its inhabitants returned and rebuilt it. And when the journalist Saverio Tutino had the idea to start a national archive of diaries in Italy, he chose this city because it had endured destruction. He wanted to create a physical representation of memory, a literal “house of memory.” The archives now contain over 8,000 different autobiographical works: memoirs, diaries, and collections of letters.
There are just three rooms in this small museum. The first has a wall of what looks like drawers, each one opening to the life of a person, their diaries archived digitally, sometimes accompanied by an audio recording by a reader. We see the diaries of a Sicilian émigré’s first sighting of the Statue of Liberty; a Milanese Countess who wrote to her lover in perpendicular lines cutting across her own horizontal sentences with vertical sentences. There’s a bricklayer’s detailed life account, even though he was barely literate, and similar writings from a farmer, a mineworker. One exhibit holds the diaries of children and teenagers whose lives span time periods and geographical locations. A young girl talks about her struggle with an eating disorder. There were graphic journals with sketches and colorful artwork.
The whole idea of this museum is that it is not about the writings of famous people. It was the innermost thoughts of everyday Italians. Not a word edited. No grammar corrected.
*
Right before we left for Italy, I got a request form through my professional speaking website, but it wasn’t an invitation to speak. Well, in a way it was.
Hi Indu, my name is Preethi Kumar and I was a friend of your mother, and attended Mount Carmel College with her. I would love to talk to you. Please contact me… Thank you, and God Bless you.
Learning about my mother’s life has been an ongoing project of mine—sometimes a side project and sometimes a primary focus. It has involved connecting with people who knew her, hearing stories, doing interviews, all in the effort to reconstruct a person I don’t have a conscious memory of. Preethi Simon was a household name, my mother’s classmate, close friend and co-worker. I have photos of her holding me as a baby, relaxing on the front porch of our house with my mother and their group of women friends, all of whom were activists.
It was ironic that she contacted me through my speaking website, this site I’ve come to use as a stage—where invitations arrive for me to speak about the failures of our healthcare system and the work of repairing it. She told me it was her son’s idea because she didn’t have another way of reaching me. I wrote back that I was overjoyed to hear from her, that she was the one person who knew my mother whom I hadn’t been able to reach, that I knew my father had been in touch with her years ago but didn’t have updated contact information for her. That yes, I’d love to speak.
*
When we finally connected, I was back at home in Los Angeles. Almost her very first question was, “What happened?” I paused for a few seconds, not expecting that. She explained that she only heard that my mother had died but didn’t know any of the details. No one contacted her after. Maybe too much was going on, she offered. I told her the little that I knew. That my mother had to travel to have surgery in Pune (we lived in Bangalore). She passed away unexpectedly after the procedure. My father stayed in Pune for many months after. I was two years old and came back to Bangalore to live with my grandmother. Preethi took it all in. I don’t know if it was satisfying.
She seemed to want to share a happier memory. She said, “I was at your baptism!” She described how my mother did this dramatic prostration at the altar. “It looked like the shape of a cross,” Preethi said with some amount of awe. They both worked together for the Grail, a very Catholic organization and movement that started in Amsterdam and was growing in India. The goal was to empower women through trainings on maternal and child health, economics, and practical skills. Preethi said many women in the Grail went on to become ambassadors at the UN. Preethi had taken on feminist media projects like a public campaign for girls to be allowed to compete equally in national chess tournaments. She didn’t need to say it, but I could tell theirs was a fierce, brilliant group of women.
My mother was often not well. Preethi said, “Sometimes we would report to her while she was in bed. She was our leader.” When nuns in their stiff habits would come to them and say, how do we help with the work you all are doing, my mother would say you are welcome, but first, about that outfit! That’s not going to make the women we are trying to help feel comfortable.
I sat listening, stunned, dizzied. I felt the same way about my work with the unhoused community in LA. How many well-intentioned people just didn’t know how to connect, or felt afraid to have a simple conversation with someone living in such a drastically different way from themselves? I didn’t struggle with that. I felt very much myself with whoever I was talking with when I volunteered on the street or in shelters. It was fluid and intuitive for me to be natural and respectful, to fit in and not stand out awkwardly like nuns in their outfits, and no one ever told me that that trait might have actually come from someone.
*
“Your mother went to Italy. “
“What? She did? I’ve never heard that story. We were just in Italy!”
“Yes! We went together. We were invited by one of the women in the Grail. Your mother was sick on that trip. She had to miss certain dinners. I helped take care of her in the hotel room. In Milan, she had to be admitted to the hospital, just for a day, for some treatment. And then she was better.”
I can see my mother having chosen to hide this aspect of her trip from people back home so as not to worry them. Maybe only Preethi knew this whole time.
“She did get to enjoy Rome. I remember our host saying, ‘I’m going to show you hundreds of years of history in a few hours.’
“That’s exactly Rome. We had that same experience!”
“Had she seen Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday?”
“Oh, we all did. Your mother loved it. When we came back to Bangalore, your father brought you to the airport to greet us. She was so happy to see you.”
I thought of how this trip might have changed my mother in oppositional ways. On the one hand, it must have been something she had always dreamed of, to visit this romantic and yet holy city. How could it not have been expansive and inspiring, but at the same time a cruel reminder of her physical limitations, requiring her to be strong while being sick and away from her family supports? Did it affect her ambition, her spirit? Everything Preethi was telling me about happened within at most a week in Europe. This is the power of days. And Preethi’s words were like short diary entries.
I didn’t know my mother had been to Italy. My father has never mentioned it. My mother’s sister, Aunt Rhoda, doesn’t remember her going. The conversation with Preethi was not just a chronicle of a missing period in someone’s life, but testimony to my mother’s private struggles, a side of herself she might have kept even from my father and her family. Even now, I wonder about whether, in speaking with Preethi, I invaded my mother’s privacy, read her diary.
We keep diaries with a paradoxical wish: to keep invisible that which we don’t want to see, or want anyone else to see, a space for that which we can’t or won’t integrate. And yet we secretly want them to be discovered and read someday. Remembered.
That Christmas in 6th grade, three thousand miles from everything and everyone I called home, in an era when phone calls were expensive and email didn’t exist, I had one place that could hold the side of myself that missed India. That was too heartbroken to be constantly happy about all the benefits of America. In my diary, I could be honest and ungrateful.
*
The centerpiece of the museum is a bedsheet. It hangs floor to ceiling in a glass case, made of white cotton, finely spun, originally a wedding gift. In neat cursive script, starting at the top and covering every last inch, is the memoir of Clelia Marchi. She started writing on the sheet soon after her husband died, to keep his memory alive, and just kept going, telling her life from the beginning, telling all about his life and their family stories. Keeping a diary can be impulsive, compulsive, private, and odd. Still, she wanted it to be read, to be displayed. There is something to be admired about its wholeness. The bedrock of Marchi’s life was her marriage and this diary on a bedsheet held everything that led up to and came out of that central event.
Some diaries are complete and comprehensive, can fit neatly across the flattop of a mattress. Others need to be pieced together from smithereens.
The story of how the Piccolo Museo Del Diario came to Pieve Santo Stefano includes an important detail, but it isn’t what they lead with on the tour. The diary museum is actually part of City Hall. When it was just an idea floating around in Saverio Tutino’s mind, it didn’t have a physical home. For it to come to life, it needed to be embraced by a civic body interested in preserving community archives. The town hall, with its “L” shape, was one of the few buildings which was not destroyed in the war. It was the mayor of the town who greenlit the project.
When you enter the museum, you pass the main room of the town hall with its dark wood chairs in a circular arrangement for the Mayor and the City Council members. That this chamber for the loud, argumentative, quotidian grind of managing a city’s public affairs sits down the hall from a wellspring of internality and intimacy that only diaries can hold poses an interesting question: could the life of a city reflect our innermost desires? Could what is secretive, shameful, and isolating be held and healed in a community not just dedicated to memory, but to the integration of our private and public lives?
When in service of communal memory, diaries are an act of resistance against erasure, the diarist as much of an archivist as an activist.
After the pandemic, it felt like a natural move to dive into public service, to help my unhoused neighbors. It was a new vantage point for me. My career before then had taken me to exotic cities and stages but left me disconnected from the world outside my own front door. After volunteering in the community for a couple of years, I thought, Why not run for a seat on my neighborhood council to have more of an impact, to fully participate in the life of my city?
My husband, son, and I took turns sitting in the chairs of the council members, taking photos before we entered the vault of diaries.
*
It feels dreamlike in the small rooms of the museum as pieces of writing float around like letters in light. The rooms are windowless but not dreary. Like we are in a catacomb of vitality, of cheer, of humor. An underground dinner party, not so much a tomb.
I think of my crates of journals back home in Los Angeles as another city of diaries. My mother is alive in this city. She can walk in it, laugh, recline, see how the work she began played out. Just like the archive’s unexpected juxtapositions where diaries of a sex worker and a cop are shelved next to each other, my mother’s story can connect with so many more people than she had the chance to meet.
Throughout the call with Preethi, we laughed and got teary about some of the shocking similarities in the turns my life had taken, the kind of work I felt called to do. My mother gave talks. I give talks. My mother walked in the rain to apologize to Preethi for something a member of our family did. I am a loyal friend, uncompromising about standing up for the slightest injustice. She said, “I’m so happy we got to connect. I just had to know what happened to that 2-year-old girl.” As we wrapped up, she added, “I hear your mother in you. You are keeping the light on.”
I now know why I’ve kept a diary forever, and probably always will. Preethi’s first words to me were, “What happened?” At first, I thought she was asking about my mother, but she was also asking about me. When stories end abruptly because people die young or mysteriously, or we emigrate and participate in the erasure of our own past, we need a way to know how things turned out. Now I know that my diaries have been a way of answering.
Indu Subaiya is a writer and entrepreneur based in Los Angeles by way of Bangalore, India. Her essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Stone Canoe, Lunch Ticket, Animal Literary Magazine, Writing the Resistance, and Immigrant Report. She is an alumnus of the Voices of our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) writing workshop and received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Antioch University.
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