“The events of everyday life are by their nature unpredictable, not at all at ease with the order that we crave as we grow older. Meaning changes, slips, adjusts, evolves. Narrative exists only in its most basic sense. Which is why I like diaries. The map may be constantly changing, the steering wheel may be spinning all over the place, but diaries are the sound of an engine running, day in and day out.”
—From the introduction to former Python Michael Palin’s Halfway to Hollywood, a collection of his own journals from 1980-1988. These eight years of his life—and 587 pages—are what I’ll tear through in the next week or so… just in case anyone wants to start a book club.
It sounds beyond bizarre, but I more than enjoyed his first collection of diaries. Not only did it appeal to the same voyeuristic part of me that makes me stare over my neighbor’s shoulder as she extracts a stack of catalogs from the mailbox, but it was also an insightful look into his creative process.
As a comic, I could appreciate his occasional frustrations that nothing coming off his typewriter was funny; as a writer, it made me think I should probably be banging out my own words, rather than reading about someone else’s inability to do just that.
