Words in the drawer

(un)reasons and addressees in the genesis of a diary

Abstract

The purpose of this article, of an essayistic nature, is to raise reflections on the impulses that permeate the writing of a personal diary, combining memories, hypotheses and readings, in order to also think about who the possible readers of the genre are and the relationships between the Self and the Other that are made through words. Carla Piazzi's novel Luminol was used as the central corpus for analysis, given its structure and content, as well as an interview with the author about the relationship between life and work in the narrative; but also reports made by other writers about their creative processes and some concepts from psychoanalysis. The article also proposes an appreciation of experience as a material for creation and looks at the dichotomies between showing oneself and hiding oneself, the individual and the universal, the private and the collective, reality and fantasy; as well as the strategies, conscious or not, that we use to make sense of existence and deal with the multiplicity, dissociation and restlessness that exist in each of us.