Panel: “How-To” Know-How: “Expert” Writing on Life Writing
Copanelists: Kathleen Boardman and Leigh Gilmore
Very early in On Being Authentic, Charles Guignon proposes that “the idea that becoming authentic is our highest goal in life might seem so self-evident as to be not worth discussing” (6). His ensuing discussion soundly contests this statement, whilst also revealing its appeal: the basic assumption built into the ideal of authenticity, that human beings desire to live the “most meaningful and worthwhile life possible” (7) is close to many hearts, including Guignon’s own (vii). This ideal, however, is not simply a matter of heartfelt desire leading to individual self-realisation: the promise to translate contemporary experience, particularly of loss, alienation, or “worthlessness,” into authentic selfrealisation is a founding project and dominant ideology of the self-help movement. Authenticity is a culture industry as much as it is an ideal “deeply ingrained in our inherited common sense” (Guignon 9).
This paper examines the strong link between life narrative and the self-help industry, a link that circles repeatedly and intensively around questions of authenticity, by focusing on one of its most prominent technologies, the self-help journal guidebook or how-to diary.
What assumptions about diary are invigorated by self-help ideology and which are suppressed? Selfhelp discourse that adopts journaling privileges the diary as a mode of personal insight and access; the diary is positioned as an authoritative genre for self-discovery, as a unique tool for both revealing and representing the self. In this paper, I examine the ways in which the how-to diary makes visible a therapeutic discourse prominent now, one that privileges the diary as a particularly authentic mode of self-representation, and that models the form as a particularly authentic way of translating life and self into text. As a cultural moment, the prominence of the how-to diary is significant, and the discourse of authenticity that these texts engender in turn reveals important assumptions about the diary in general, particularly now.
Kylie Cardell is Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Flinders University, South Australia. She received her PhD from the University of Queensland in 2007. Her thesis, “Everyday Authenticity: Contemporary Uses of the Diary,” explores how contemporary diary forms become implicated in certain discursive constructions of self and subjectivity, and explores how (and why) the diary is particularly imbricated in ideas of authenticity that energise and complicate acts of self-representation. Current research projects include the ethics of humorous life writing, particularly in the composite memoirs of American essayist David Sedaris; life narration and the discourses of therapeutic writing; and an analysis of epistolarity and the diary.