A not-so-secret history of the diary and the people who write-and read-them, for lock-and-key diarists and restaurant-conversation eavesdroppers alike

Featuring iconic diary keepers like Audre Lorde, Virgina Woolf, Alison Bechdel, and Taylor Swift

We know what it was like to be an out lesbian in 19th-century England, what the inner world of a young girl in hiding looks like, and what the earliest internet users' favorite websites were, in part, because of diaries. Our Diaries, Ourselves is a joyful deep dive into this time-honored tradition of preserving our love, loss, genius, and grocery lists.

From Marie Curie to Taylor Swift, this book illustrates how a person's experience of the world is shaped by the diaries they keep. Tour Italy's "City of the Diary," Pieve Santo Stefano, which boasts a diary archive, museum, and annual festival. Discover how women have used diaries for centuries as canvases for self-expression and as tools of resistance in a patriarchal society. Travel through time and across cultures, from renowned figures to ordinary people, for glimpses of their lives-different yet comfortingly familiar.

Our Diaries, Ourselves is a treasure trove of social history, feminist rebellion, and personal reflection. It celebrates the obscure and the mundane and the ephemeral. It reminds us of a uniquely human need that transcends time, language, and technology: to see and be seen, to be heard and understood and remembered.