Gendered Journaling

This is from the opening of Henry Reed, Inc., written by Keith Robertson and published in 1958.

This is a journal, not a diary. Diaries are kept by girls and tell all about their dates and what they think of different boy friends. My mother says that men keep diaries too, that the most famous diary in the world was kept a long time ago by an Englishman named Pepys. That may be so, but when I read about pirates and explorers and sea captains they always keep journals, so this is going to be a journal. It is going to be a record of what happens to me this summer in New Jersey.

And this is the opening of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, by Jeff Kinney, as first published on the FunBrain website in 2004 (later published on paper in 2007).

More than four decades and a wave of feminism separate the two books, but both young male narrators insist, “This is a journal, not a diary.”

The G-Man Retcon

Chris Giarrusso created his comic G-Man in bits and pieces: short stories, backup features, comic strips, half-parodies of other superhero sagas.

As the Image Comics webpage for the first volume says, G-Man: Learning to Fly “Collects the origin of G-Man and Great Man, the G-Man Christmas Story, Mean Brother/Idiot Brother adventures, and a complete collection of the original G-Man comic strips that started it all.”

Because that book is a grab bag, its pieces come in different sizes and lengths. Some were obviously designed for different sizes, and they have different storytelling rhythms. It’s still a fun read. We see Mikey and his big brother Dave gaining their powers from the family’s magic cape. Several of their (male) friends already have superpowers, with no explanation. It’s just a fact of life at their school.

Two G-Man miniseries/graphic novels followed, each with a wider focus showing more of the brothers’ universe. There’s more explanation of the magic cape in Cape Crisis, the best of the volumes. We meet the Color Guardians, female classmates who are one unfathomable mass to the boys, and the Suntroopers and Thunderfriends teams of grown-up heroes.

The latest G-Man installment comes from another publisher and takes another form: an illustrated middle-grade novel written as a daily journal, like Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Rachel Renee Russell’s Dork Diaries. Most of the pictures, supposedly by young Mikey, are in a simpler, line-art style which Giarrusso is also using for a weekly online comic strip. There are occasional full-color pin-up pages as well, in the guise of photos taped into the journal.

In addition, The G-Man Super Journal: Awesome Origins is a prequel, going back not only to before Mikey gained his powers but before all his friends had theirs. It folds in characters who first appeared in the graphic novels, such as the Color Guardians, Cool Wraps, and that annoying kid Tony. And it offers explanations for how all the kids got their powers. Actually, several explanations for each: alien birth, divine descent, freak accidents, top-secret website in Japan, and so on. As a result, G-Man: Super Journal is now the most complete introduction to the G brothers’ saga.

Whereas Learning to Fly’s big scenes are mostly at home and Cape Crisis on the playground, Awesome Origins is driven by events at school: Mikey’s struggle with a teacher who doesn’t like superheroes, tests to join the Suntroopers, and most especially that annoying kid Tony. The illustrations have a deadpan sarcasm that (along with the superpowers, of course) distinguishes this series from its diaristic forebears.

I still prefer the G-Man comics, but a mostly-new G-Man story in illustrated prose form is still a lot of fun. And its publisher’s wider distribution might bring new readers to all the volumes.

When Nate Wright Met Greg Heffley

Yesterday’s post left aspiring comic-strip artist Jeff Kinney working at an online “edutainment” company while corresponding with full-time comic-strip artist Lincoln Peirce.

As I described back here, Kinney’s employer saw some potential in a middle-grade novel in diary form that he was working on. At his boss’s suggestion, he added more illustrations and shared the novel day by day on the company’s website.

That story found a young online audience quickly, a book deal only after a couple of years. That was the start of the huge Diary of a Wimpy Kid phenomenon, now stronger than ever.

Kinney continued to work at that company until relatively recently, overseeing the launch of Poptropica. That online videogame platform is built around “islands,” each having its own game and style. Kinney asked his friend Peirce if he was interested in licensing the Big Nate comic strip to the site.

In 2010 the Washington Post reported what happened:

On Valentine's Day last year, Poptropica launched "Big Nate Island," the interactive world of sixth-grader Nate Wright and his adventures as a "self-described genius" and "all-time record-holder for detentions in school history."

Kids went wild. "All I remember is that Jeff called me after the first 48 hours and said: 'You crashed the server,' " Peirce recalls. "It was their biggest launch by 20 percent."

The sudden online popularity of "Big Nate" led to Peirce's long-sought major book deal, with no less than HarperCollins. "Big Nate: In a Class by Himself" just spent 11 straight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

That first Big Nate book series is one of many modeled on Diary of a Wimpy Kid: prose with lots of line art, paper-over-board covers, humorous slice-of-life stories, and so on. Its success prompted the comic strip’s syndicate to finally issue Big Nate comics collections. Meaning that after years of having no books and a daily deadline, Lincoln Peirce had two fast-selling book series and an audience beyond newsprint.

And all because he’d been nice enough to write back to an aspiring young college artist. It’s almost as if this publishing story has a moral.

Big Nate in a Small Pond

One of the minor pleasures of visiting my dad in the Washington, DC, area is the Washington Post comics page. For some reason it’s unusually large. (Perhaps the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder and major owner of the rival Washington Times, didn’t like comics?)

Among the comic strips I enjoyed there, years before it came to the Boston Globe, is Big Nate by Lincoln Peirce. Given its quality and longevity, and its appeal to kids, I assumed that there were Big Nate collections like the bestselling collections of Peanuts, Garfield, and Calvin and Hobbes when I was young. But with fewer and fewer children reading newspapers, that ready market no longer existed.

Lincoln Peirce kept plugging away, the way daily-strip artists have to do. He also generously offered advice to a hopeful artist eight years younger. This Washington Post story from five years ago tells that story:

It was the early '90s, and [Jeff] Kinney was an aspiring cartoonist at the University of Maryland, as well as a big fan of the comic strip "Big Nate," which he read in The Post. Kinney wanted advice on how to break into the business, so he wrote several cartoonists, including Peirce, creator of the recently syndicated "Big Nate."

Up in New Hampshire, Peirce was struck by Kinney's outreach. "His letter was so different from other letters," Peirce recalls. "And not just because it was five to six pages long. Even early on, he was very talented and very ambitious."

Instead of eyeing him warily, Peirce did the professionally generous thing: "I wrote him back."

Kinney the college cartoonist was thrilled. "It was a handwritten letter, which included many drawings that provided guidance on how I could improve my prospects," he recounts.

For more than two years, mentor and student exchanged handwritten and hand-drawn insights into their craft.

Meanwhile, the world wide web grew, and the newspaper business shrank. It was not a good time to start a career as a daily newspaper cartoonist. Kinney ended up working as a designer for an online “edutainment” company.

TOMORROW: Returning the favor.

(Thanks to Karen Jordan Allen for the link.)

Da Poof from Chudney Patterson

These panels come from “A Day in the Life of Chudney,” a one-page comic by sixteen-year-old Chudney Patterson which just won grand prize in a contest for young cartoonists sponsored by author-illustrator Jeff Kinney.

As School Library Journal explains, the contest also brought a prize for Patterson’s school library in New Jersey, which has suffered major budget cuts. Apparently Patterson felt that keenly as the daughter of a librarian.

In the panels above, the character of Chudney explains her art with a superhero metaphor:

When I draw, I am DA POOF! Able to fly at the speed of light and headbutt my enemies. I am AWESOME!

I even make little comics for my friends, trying to make them laugh.

So now young American women are winning the comics contests, the national science fairs, the World Cup semis. Not to mention the usual spelling bee. Do teen-aged boys need to step up their game?

Reasons to Smile

Today Roger Sutton announced that Raina Telgemeier’s memoir Smile is an Honor Book in the Nonfiction category of the 2010 Boston Globe/Horn Book Awards.

Even before that news, the book’s first printing sold out—despite the fact that it’s still possible to read Smile on the web. Like Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid (discussed here), Telgemeier’s book took a path to publication that seems paradoxical yet worked.

Both Kinney and Telgemeier shared their stories on the web before finding publishers. That exposure helped them to build a following as they developed their vision. Lots of people liked the result. Some of those people probably still see no need to buy the books, but many more did buy, and told their friends as well.

Since I ended my SCBWI New England conference workshop on comics scripting by suggesting that this model looked like the best route to publication, I’m delighted to have a new example of success to point to.

Jason Green interviewed Telgemeier for Playback:stl about her choice to display finished pages on the web as she created them, starting in 2004. Telgemeier explained:

I really love the print medium, and so [that] was always what I wanted to do, was to make books. And the webcomics thing happened because people kept saying, “Put your stuff on the web! Put your stuff on the web!” I didn’t know how to do that! I didn’t know what an FTP program was, I didn’t know how to get comics from my page to a screen. I had to have it all explained to me, over and over again, in detail, before I sort of figured it out.

And once I did, it was like, “Oh, I get it, you can get a much bigger audience this way, and you can really do a lot of interesting things with page layouts,” and stuff like that. But, because I came from print, I was still not stretching my wings too far as far as the format of the story, and I knew that I wanted to print it someday. So, I think it was like I was making a print graphic novel, but I was serializing it on the web on a weekly basis.

Before then, Telgemeier had self-published her mini-comic Takeout, another way of developing an audience. That route was easier years ago, given the economics of comics distribution, but today the web is clearly more affordable and powerful. Of course, you’ve gotta have appealing content and the energy to promote it.

In the same year that Telgemeier started to share Smile, Scholastic’s David Saylor announced that the firm had commissioned her to adapt Ann S. Martin’s Baby-Sitters Club into comics form. The success of those books helped put her name on booksellers’ computers.

Telgemeier could probably have published Smile herself, based on that success, but the effort would have taken a lot of her time. Instead, she signed with Scholastic. That firm has a powerful distribution arm, including those school book fairs. It has the capital to invest in color printing, as with Jeff Smith’s Bone, which sets the print edition of Smile off from the web pages. And there’s still cachet in coming out through a major publisher—but that’s not as valuable as an already established readership.

The Atlantic Gets Diary of a Wimpy Kid

In a review of the recent movie adaptation, James Parker writes perceptively for the Atlantic Monthly about how Jeff Kinney’s books work:

Diary of a Wimpy Kid and its three sequel volumes are droll, coolly experimental, and quite clearly—as far as the kids are concerned—on the money. The cartoons are in a continual and rather sophisticated dialogue with the text, answering, amplifying, or ironizing it, and it’s amazing how much funniness Kinney can inject into his spare little images.

In contrast, I was disappointed in the reaction of the Boston Globe’s Ty Burr:

The movie’s bigger problem is that its live-action Greg Heffley is a jerk. In his quest for instant fame, our hero treats his friend like dirt, trash-talks the school’s perfectly reasonable alt-girl (Chloë Moretz), ditches a group of kindergartners in a construction pit in the rain (and blames it on Rowley), and otherwise behaves like a little Hun.

Yeah, Greg is ruthless. That’s the point. His ruthlessness in self-preservation is, like his humiliations, elevated a bit above what most books reveal about middle school. Maybe this doesn’t come across as nicely on screen, but I got the sense Burr was expecting a more typical movie.

Finally, an even less kindly review from Godson’s Brother when first looking into Diary of a Wimpy Kit Do-It-Yourself Book, the spin-off meant to encourage kids to try their own writing and cartoons:

they are just blank because Jeff Kinney is too lazy to think up anything more himself

Wolverine Meets Wimpy Kid—Who Would Win?

A while back, Graphic Novel Reporter ran a preview of Wolverine: Worst Day Ever, written by Barry Lyga and illustrated by various Marvel Comics artists.

The website called the book a “graphic novel,” which prompted a visitor [okay, it was me] to comment:

I'm glad to see Barry Lyga getting work. But why is Wolverine: Worst Day Ever being described as a “a YA graphic novel”? It's an illustrated story which uses very little of the comics format. And are the illustrations original to this project or repurposed?

When GNR went back to review the book, it answered those questions:

Wolverine: Worst Day Ever is close to being a prose work itself. It uses the blog format to advance its story, combined with archive images of Wolverine that have appeared in comics throughout the years. So while not technically a graphic novel per se, it has several of the elements (not least of which is one of the most popular characters to ever appear in comics).

And the book was scheduled, I suspect, to appear alongside this spring's Wolverine movie.

Lyga, former employee of the Diamond comics distribution monopoly and award-winning YA novelist, seems like a good choice to bridge the worlds of superheroes and YA prose fiction. And he understands that Wolverine: Worst Day Ever isn't a graphic novel. In an interview at Comic Book Resources Lyga discussed how his text interacts with the artwork:

In the Wimpy Kid books [by Jeff Kinney], the artwork is sort of seamlessly integrated into the text as an essential part of the story. You can't remove the art and have a coherent story, really. In that sense, they are sort of prototype graphic novels, in a way, with the art conveying story points.

With Worst Day Ever, my original thought was that the artwork would stand alone, on separate pages, like a traditional illustrated novel. But a couple of things happened. First of all, some of the art just SCREAMED for snarky captions in [the narrator] Eric's voice, and I got carried away. Next thing you knew, I was writing captions for every piece of art, not just a few.

And then, secondly, Marvel's designer made the artwork blend with the text in a very natural way, not on separate pages, but actually with the text, so that the art sort of comments on the text. Which actually makes sense--the book is supposed to be a blog, and on blogs, art co-exists with text. So it's a very organic and sensible decision. Her name is Spring [Hoteling], and she's done a great job designing the book.

That said, unlike in Wimpy Kid, if you removed the art, you would still have a complete story. It might not be quite as funny, but it would still be a complete story. I'm not 100% sure that's the case with Wimpy Kid--I think you'd lose more than mood or atmosphere if you yanked the art.

I wasn't so sure; Wimpy Kid was first written with much less art. But at least everyone agrees that just because a book contains lots of pictures--even cartoons or drawings of superheroes--that doesn't make it a "graphic novel."

How Diary of a Wimpy Kid Found Its Audience

As Jeff Kinney has described in interviews, he started writing Diary of a Wimpy Kid without expecting it to be categorized as a graphic novel. Indeed, he wasn't thinking of it as a book for kids. It was simply a story he had to tell. (There's a little autobiography in Greg Heffley's adventures.)

Kinney was working for an online education site called FunBrain.com, managing content for its website. FunBrain is part of a company called the Family Education Network, which is turn was a small wing of the multinational publishing conglomerate which will remain Pearson.

Kinney's boss, Jess Brallier, had been involved in marketing many bestselling books: William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, Bailey White's Mama Makes Up Her Mind, Sylvia Branzei's Grossology, and his own Lawyers and Other Reptiles, among others.

When Brallier saw Kinney's manuscript, he thought the material could work well on the FunBrain site, doled out in daily installments. That online format would require Kinney to draw more art--illustrations for each day's entry. And just maybe it would draw enough of an audience to interest a book publisher, since Kinney still wanted to see Wimpy Kid published as a novel.

Jess Brallier is a publishing friend of mine, so he clued me into Wimpy Kid early on. Even before I had broadband, I was looking at the daily installments. And so were a growing number of other folks. (Nobody from book-publishing was biting, though.) In the summer of 2004 Jess proudly sent me some of the feature's early online reviews. On 9 July--I just looked it up--I emailed back:

One observation: the jengajam.com comments are filed in the category "animation."

And this [Pottsville] library site refers to "the ever popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid cartoon."

So at least some of Jeff's audience don't see his creation as a book, but as something in a different art/storytelling form.

Not that there was anything wrong with that.

Wimpy Kid was emerging in readers' eyes as something other than a traditional novel. The combination of text and art, and the short daily installments, made people classify Kinney's work as a sort of cartoon, even though his text drives his story. That categorization might have produced a mental block that prevented traditional book editors from seeing the potential for a Wimpy Kid book. (Not to mention that FunBrain was already giving away the content for free.) Meanwhile, the site was getting thousands of hits a day.

Two years later, Kinney finally connected with the man who became his print editor at the New York Comic-Con, a convention on comics. Charlie Kochman of Abrams was open to work in the comics format--that's why he was there. And thus graphic-novel history was made. (This year's New York Comic-Con starts on Friday.)

Jess Brallier is now recommending people take a look at Talia Rivera's blog about being a parent: "I think this wonderfully captures a mother/wife who represents a population segment from who we otherwise don’t hear. Talia is somebody we should publish; with pride, enthusiasm, and anticipation."

And the Wimpy Kid Backlash Begins

Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid series has dominated Publishers Weekly's list of bestselling books in comics form for so long that folks are whispering that maybe it doesn't belong there at all. Which may not be a bad thing; that's how we got separate New York Times Book Review bestseller lists for kids' books, to keep Harry Potter books from snatching the opportunities of publishers of adult fiction to say their books were New York Times bestsellers.

Esther Keller at Good Comics for Kids recently made the case that Wimpy Kid isn't a comic:

The pictures add a lot to the story, but by no means are they [and the text] interdependent and this was definitely my feeling when I read the first volume a year or so ago. The pictures make me laugh. They make me pause – but often the pictures pull me out of the writing (not the story). I could enjoy the pictures on a page of Time Magazine or I could enjoy them within the book. I could read the story without the pictures, and still laugh out loud.

Okay, it's not a harsh backlash.

I think Keller is absolutely right that the Wimpy Kid books aren't in comics form. They're closer to traditional illustrated novels, in that the text can be read without the art.

Indeed, what I think is ground-breaking about Kinney's approach to illustration is how the cartoons often comment on the text rather than simply depict it. Like Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the Wimpy Kid books combine pictures and text differently from traditional illustrated novels--but nonetheless also different from comics.

Yet another voice from that position is none other than author-artist Jeff Kinney himself. As he told the New York Times:

“I go to book conferences and cartooning conferences now and I don’t feel comfortable in either setting,” said the man whose text-and-cartoon books have been on best-seller lists for nearly two years. “I’m not a real author and not a real cartoonist. I’m a failed cartoonist.”

And USA Today quoted Kinney as calling his books "novels in cartoons." (The release of third volume The Last Straw has brought him out for publicity interviews.)

The truth is that when Kinney wrote Wimpy Kid, the pictures were a small part of his vision. The project took a lot of twists and turns before it was placed in the questionable category of "comics."

TOMORROW: Back at the beginning, or how I met Jeff Kinney before he was a best-selling failed cartoonist.

What “Agonized ‘Arts & Ideas’ Articles”?

Earlier this month Dan Kois gave New York magazine a catch-up review of two novels for kids that have already been on the bestseller and awards lists for months: Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid volumes.

Kois linked those books to yet a third set of successful kids' books with lots of art: manga, and comics-style books in general. And then he tried to expand the whole thing into Significance by calling all this "the incursion of comics into 'respectable' children’s fiction."

Kois is quite right that "for typical young-teen readers, graphic storytelling [i.e., comics] is now as familiar a language as traditional chapter books." But I think only the manga fit the comics form. I've already made my case that the graphic elements of Hugo Cabret work differently from the graphic elements of comics, more like the images of cinema.

As for the art in the Wimpy Kid volumes, there's a lot more of it than in a typical middle-grade novel, but it functions in a traditional way. Kinney's drawings usually comment and supplement his text but don't replace it. The pictures have more in common with single-panel gag cartoons than with "sequential art." In number and style, the Wimpy Kid illustrations don't fit the usual model of an illustrated children's novel, but they're a lot closer than Kois's other examples.

I appreciate the scarequotes that Kois put into his phrase "'respectable' children's fiction." At the same time, I think he wildly overstated the walls around that respectability when he concluded that:

Cabret and Wimpy Kid [are] books whose success might ten years ago have provoked agonized “Arts & Ideas” articles about the debasement of children’s literature.

Yes, given its style of art and humor, Wimpy Kid would probably be seen as "product" in nearly any era (including, perhaps, ours)--not that it debases anything. But I find it hard to imagine that Hugo Cabret would have raised eyebrows very high, much less "agonized" folks in the field of children's literature, ten or even twenty or thirty years ago.

Hugo Cabret is, after all, historical fiction. It comments on Art. It ends with a sense of hope (more hope than poor Greg Heffley enjoys). It's the sort of story for children that has always won admiring reviews and awards, and the fact that it contains pretty pictures that can also be analyzed as Art only increases its "respectability."

Balloons and Other Ways Comics Show the Invisible

Probably the most visible hallmark of comics style is the use of speech balloons. For centuries artists have conveyed the idea that people are speaking by writing words into their art and connecting those words to particular figures. Over the last hundred years comics artists have developed sophisticated systems of using words in balloons to convey tone, emotion, pace, sources of sound, and other aspects of speech. In fact, in some ways this approach outperforms prose in conveying the nuances of how we talk. Here’s a small sampling of variations from Web Comic Triage.

Seeing speech balloons in a picture book or illustrated novel seems to cue people into saying those books have a "comics" style. I think that's another big reason why people view Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen as different from other picture books. As the page image back here shows, Sendak sprinkled some speech balloons into his recipe.

Another example of such a hybrid is the recent bestseller Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Jeff Kinney conceived that as a novel with some comics-style illustrations supplementing and commenting on the prose. When his story was first published in installments on FunBrain.com a couple of years back, the web format called for art on every page. I noticed then that other websites were reviewing Wimpy Kid as a webcomic--it had come to look as much like a comic as like a novel.

Speech balloons are just one part of the visual language of comics that makes visible many experiences that we can't ordinarily see in a still image. In addition to spoken words, these things include:

• Verbal thoughts. Words can appear in puffy thought balloons. Artists can also depict thoughts visually, showing a character's fantasy or fear or plan.
• Nonverbal emotions and states of mind, conveyed through beads of sweat popping off a forehead (as in the "Mr. Wonderful" comic in today's New York Times Magazine), cultural symbols (broken heart, bleeding nose, birds circling the head), chibi versions of characters acting out their emotions, and more.
• Sound effects. POW! sssssss. Fwapfwapfwapfwapfwap... These visual elements are especially difficult to deal with in translations since the letter forms themselves become integral to the art.
  
• Motion and impact. Different artists convey speed by adding motion lines behind the moving object, blurring the object, blurring the background, and/or drawing multiple images.
• Labels from the narrator for the benefit of the reader.
  

Some critics even see this visual language as crucial to distinguishing comics from other forms of sequential art. R. C. Harvey reportedly says in The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History that Hal Foster's Prince Valiant is "not comics" because of its resolute separation of words and pictures; it famously doesn't include speech balloons. Other critics say that's ridiculously judgmental, that Prince Valiant has earned its place among comics through longevity and graphic quality. All I can say is that one look at Prince Valiant shows that it's different from everything else on the funny pages. It alone uses pictures and prose like a traditional picture book.

Traditional picture-book storytelling eschews the visual language of comics in favor of a more realistic approach. That may seem odd, considering that picture books abound in talking animals, cartoonish people, magic, and other unrealistic things. But still, it's rare to see the techniques listed above in today's full-color picture books.

Picture-book artists seem most comfortable with the less verbal and symbolic and the most visual of those techniques. Eric Rohmann's My Friend Rabbit has motion lines, for example. (His more traditional Cinder-Eyed Cats does not.) Robert McCloskey's Lentil used a few motion lines and a lot of musical notes--almost necessary for telling a story about music.

It's still a rare picture book which incorporates sound effects into the art or shows characters' speeches and thoughts inside balloons, however. And when an artist does use those techniques, as in Little Vampire Goes to School, librarians seem to be shelving those books with "graphic novels" simply because they all use the visual language of comics.

A Long Look at Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Last weekend I attended a history conference on diaries in New England from pre-Revolutionary times to the late twentieth century. At one point historian Lynne Bassett asked for thoughts on why diary-keeping seems to have become a feminine activity.

I piped up with an allusion to the first paragraph of Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid, now appearing both on the NYTBR bestseller list and on FunBrain.com:

First of all, I want to get something straight: this is a JOURNAL, not a diary. I know what it says on the cover but when Mom went out to buy this thing I SPECIFICALLY said to make sure it didn’t say “diary” on it. So don’t expect me to be all “dear diary this” and “dear diary that.”

This is followed by a cartoon of a bully punching our narrator while yelling, “SISSY!” The gendered implications could hardly be clearer.

How did we get from Samuel Pepys keeping a daily record of his work as Navy secretary, marriage, genteel social life, and sexual dalliances to young Greg Heffley insisting he doesn’t keep a diary, no, not him?

In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, both men and women in America and Britain kept diaries. In fact, because literary rates were higher for males, men wrote more diaries than women.

In the early part of that period, diaries weren’t necessarily private documents. Gentlemen might invite their friends to read their records of important events, or copy out entries to send to relatives. Some men, such as William Byrd of Virginia, kept private diaries for what they wanted to keep confidential and public versions to share.

In addition, those diaries tended to be records of events: the weather, business matters, dining partners, the receipt of news, and so on. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that people commonly made their diaries the repository of their deepest feelings. That turned diaries into private documents for the writers and trusted loved ones, leading eventually to diaries being marketed with locks on them. In general nineteenth-century men expressed their emotions in their diaries as freely as women did.

But then post-Victorian culture started to shoo men away from sentiment, and everything that had come to be associated with it--including diaries. Especially diaries of the “dear diary this” kind. And for American boys in seventh grade, like the fictional Greg Heffley, questions of masculinity and femininity are very important.

So Greg tells us that “I think Mom has this idea that I’m going to write down my ‘feelings’ and all that, but she’s not actually allowed to read it so I figure I’ll just write what I want.” Ironically, the secrecy that once shielded expressions of emotion has become his shield for not expressing his emotions--at least outright. (In fact, it’s mighty clear how Greg feels about things.)

I’m not sure how our current gendered distinction between “diary” and “journal” arose. The terms are synonymous, both going back to the same Latin root as in “diurnal.” But it’s so widespread that Simon & Schuster took care to label their My Name Is America books for boys as “journals” while the older Dear America series for girls remain “diaries.”