Let’s Explore Epistolary Books Part 1 – Nonfiction

Keeping a diary or journal is a very cathartic way to talk out your feelings to an audience who won’t feel burdened by or lose interest in your ramblings. You have the floor for as long as you need. You can write in long, sweeping paragraphs, or you can write in fragments. You can doodle in the margins or paste in keepsakes.

I don’t think that most people keep a diary with the intention of using it to write their autobiography or memoirs. But often, I learn that it’s the most important resource when people do decide to write a book about their lives or experiences during a particular era.

Some keep the format as is and maybe just tweak it for publication. Others pull out the juiciest parts and compile them into a cohesive narrative. And I’ve read printed off copies of the entries in the writer’s own writing, complete with scratch outs and unflattering thoughts.

It feels like both intruding in and being let into a secret world when you read an epistolary book. In my two-part series, I explore the technical, philosophical, and stylistic messages that both the nonfiction and fiction entries present to both readers and fellow writers. First, let’s explore non-fiction epistolary books.

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Formatting the book

Epistolary books are centered around their format. How much of it will be straight entries, letters, or emails, and how much additional, polished narrative will the author add in?

There is no wrong answer, but there are choices that need to be made and will determine how readers will see the finished product. I feel that readers like the unorthodox format of an epistolary book.

These books aren’t just straight paragraphs. They’re spaced differently from a regular book. They’re organized differently, and they feel more like a found piece of writing rather than one tailored directly to the reader, creating a different dynamic between the writer and their audience.

Traditional epistolary books

The most straightforward way to create an epistolary book is to just present each entry in order and allow it to tell the story in its rawest form. Everything unfolds naturally, and the writer’s attitude, observations, and writing style evolves in a very organic way.

The two books that I think of when I think of this style of writing are two books from Laura Ingalls Wilder: On the Way Home and West From Home. After a brief introduction by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, On the Way Home presents a documented account of her family’s move from South Dakota to Missouri in the late 1800s. Some entries are a few pages are long while others are a few lines. She mainly writes in formal, unemotional way, just to keep track of how far they had come and what they had seen each day.

West From Home is much more emotionally driven. This book is full of letters that Wilder wrote to her husband while visiting her daughter in San Francisco in 1915. Keeping this audience in mind causes her to be more descriptive and reflective of what she had seen and done. The trip itself was a leisurely one compared to the stress of uprooting her home and traveling into unknown territory with an even more unknown future in Far From Home.

These two books are a clear example of one writer writing in two different ways. The setting, the situation, and the life experience really inform the writing style, and it helps to set the tone for each book as a whole.

Also check out my post, Ranking The Little House Series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, here!

Using diary and journal entries to create a polished memoir

Some epistolary books start with the review of the diary entries and work to create a summary of events based on these entries. They may use excerpts from the entries, but ultimately, they choose to write it in a polished way that feels like a narrative written from scratch.

The first book I think of that’s written in this style is Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist. The late actor’s final book was a look at the making of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, a film that has been written about to death, though not solely from this star’s perspective.

Fisher was tasked with returning to the mindset of her late teens, of sharing her secret on-set affair which she must have known would become the focal point of the book and every interview she’d have to give about the book, and exposing her vulnerabilities. The final section of the book is a word-for-word stream-of-consciousness, style of writing which feels so sloppy yet confessional. When I read the book as an audiobook, the author’s daughter read these entries aloud, creating another layer of awkwardness, but it was also very admirable.

Fisher knew that, even though she was writing about an experience that few could relate to, sharing the lack of confidence that she felt was something that everyone could relate to. The juxtaposition between the two halves of the book mirrored the author’s public and private personas and helped to show how presentation is everything.

Diary editing

Diary and journal entries typically only ever reach the first draft stage, but that doesn’t mean that they can never be edited. When I first read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, admittedly not to long ago, I was surprised to read in the prologue that Frank’s intention was for this book to be read by the masses. She had heard about a call for documented wartime experiences on the radio.

As a result, there are three versions of this story, two written by Anne and one edited by her father, Otto Frank. It not only gave her something to do in hiding, but it also gave her permission to work towards her goal of becoming a writer.

All three versions are Anne’s truth, even when some of that truth is omitted or reworked. They are also all very humanizing and complicated.

Anne pulls no punches when upset with her roommates or even her own family members. Her hormonal teen years are put on full display as the most mundane arguments are blown out of proportion. Yet, Anne doesn’t seem to bother about how she comes across, only how she feels in the moment, which is very refreshing and is something that readers can connect to. They also show how, even in the safety of the attic, their brains atrophied and morale fell.

It’s easy to forget how Anne’s story ends when you’re thick in the weeds of her final years. There’s no shock value to add to a story that’s already so shocking. It’s also not fair not to have her come out okay on the other side, but that’s the truth of her story and of the countless others she represents in her small, yet important place in history.

Warts and all

The least polished epistolary non-fiction book I’ve ever read was Journals by Kurt Cobain. Literally presented as Xeroxed copies of pages of his notebooks, spirals, lines, crossed out drawings, and more, this book is a sloppy mess of pages containing famous song lyrics, multiple versions of a variety of truths and untruths, and an ever-changing writing style and topics of focus.

Even the differences in his handwriting and line spaces speak volumes about the rock star’s mindset at the time of writing. Sometimes his lettering is large and spaced out while other times it’s small, cramped, and wordy.

I’ve come across multiple journals in my life, and I’m always amazed by the creativity, style, and care that some people put into it. It makes me ashamed that I don’t include a unique way of pulling my thoughts together, that sometimes I write in the margins when I run out of space, or that I can get slopping, flipflopping from cursive to print or writing like I’m on a timer, sometimes running off of the lines or page.

This book showed me that sloppy is fine. Scratching out words is fine. Writing a bad draft of something is fine because it gets the junk out.

The first page of a new notebook was used to start to draft out the first sentences of this post, and it was terrible. Yet, the print was neat and tidy, there was a spark of what I wanted to say in this post, and it made me feel productive to at least jot my thoughts down and get the ball rolling.

Final thoughts on nonfiction epistolary novels

In the end, it’s a privilege to be let into the real world of a writer in any form. It’s all biased and misremembered and concentrated to a certain perspective, but it’s as close to time travel as we’ve ever gotten to relive important moments in a person’s life.

So, if you want to write your memoir or autobiography, think about how you’ll want to present that story. If you save your journals or diaries, how comfortable are you with sharing those entries, or with the fact that someone else could share them after you’re gone? What can we learn about you by the moments you choose to document and the experiences you ended up having?

What are your favorite epistolary nonfiction books? Leave your answers in the comments below!

Part 2 of my series featuring fiction books will follow!

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