I began keeping a journal in the summer of 2022. Fifty three years prior to that event, Joan Didion wrote that “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” Is this true now, when all the world seems no longer a stage, but rather billions of public digital diaries, pulsing and flashing across our collective vision? Does this make all of us “anxious malcontents”? Probably. I like reading other people’s diaries. I am interested in them. I am interested in writing and privacy and publicity; I am interested in knowledge and its dissemination.
In my work, I have argued that the fields of literature and history are inseparable – indeed, that they are one and the same. All history is a work of fiction; all nonfiction works of history. In this way, we understand ourselves.
I read constantly about the past. I read constantly. I understand myself through that material. Mark Kurlansky and Lilian Faderman convinced me to study history when I read their books on my A Train commute to high school. Wandering through Dublin in 2023, I spent hours on park benches reading the works of David Foster Wallace. Crying inconsolably in the woods of Vermont, I finished Elif Batuman’s The Idiot and Either/Or. Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends was near biblical to me during my sophomore year of college – I would carry my annotated copy in my bag at all times, turning to a page at random and consulting when needed with my liturgy. The year prior, I had done the same with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ novels on Brown’s quad my senior year was a twisted revelation. Driving across the country, my companion and I took turns reading aloud from Carrie Brownstein’s memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, which I finished alone on the floor of a motel bathroom. This is not a reading list so much as an autobiography.
In the college library, I taped photos of my favorite historians to the wall above my desk. I dressed as historian Hayden White for a costume party. It seems, at times, I am incapable of undergoing a conversation without invoking my personal pantheon of feminist scholars: Andrea Dworkin, Amia Srinivasan, Andrea Long Chu, Silvia Federici. Their intellect sparks against me. I simmer in pretension. My friends laugh at the way I speak through a web of references, often inscrutably so. I write notes on what I read in my journal, beside pasted-in receipts and postcards. I draw pictures of Mo from Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For to keep the ephemera company, speech bubbles with snarky commentary hanging from her mouth. I draw, write, collage, and the forms and media blend and blur.
I like it, my diary. I like to read history and fiction and poetry, which is to say, other people’s diaries. I like works which are expansive, experimental, interdisciplinary, multimedia. I am excited to read your work, so you should let me read it. I am a good reader – I pride myself on it. I am in search of something, as are all of us who read (perhaps there’s a joke about Proust to be made here, but I’ll leave it to the experts). I am inexpert and excited. I am happy to be here. I am balancing a book on my head.
Lia Ortner (she/her) earned her BA in History and Comparative Literature from Brown University in 2025, with her thesis on Medieval literature being granted the John A. Thomas Memorial Award. For the past year, she has been in Athens, Greece on a fellowship with the American College of Greece. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Lia is an educator, historian, killjoy feminist, amateur semiologist, and collage enthusiast. She enjoys drinking coffee in bed.
- The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Night Is What It Eats by Danielle Hanson - September 8, 2026
- Sundress Reads: Review of sipèstisyon - September 7, 2026
- Meet Our New Intern: Lia Ortner - September 7, 2026