Part 2, Personals: On Keeping a Notebook Summary and Analysis

Didion kept a notebook since she was five years old. She has a habit of writing down notes in order to remember certain situations. However, whenever she looks back on these notes, Didion often cannot remember to what the note is referring. The author reads one note about a woman in a dirty wrapper in a hotel bar and wonders why this was important to her at the time; as she ponders this, she recollects the morning she wrote the note and comes to the conclusion that she wrote the note not to remember the woman, but to remember the way she felt at the time. Here she explains to the reader that keeping a notebook is not to keep a factual record or even a diary, but to remember how...