May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude was first published in 1973. She had written memoirs previously, but turned to journal writing in a quest for “a more immediate, less controlled record of life.”

Journal of a Solitude:

September 15th

Begin here. It is raining. I look out on the maple, where few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself, and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my ‘real’ life again at last. That’s what is strange — that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life, unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and the…