I Am Obsessed with Reading Dead People's Diaries

I've been interested in diaries as a literary genre for almost as long as I can remember. Fake ones (the Dear America series of children's books; Catherine, Called Birdy; Don't You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey), real ones (Anne Frank, Samuel Pepys, Sylvia Plath, Anne Lister, Virginia Woolf), blogs, vlogs, and more! I want the juicy, mundane details of the everyday lives of strangers. Unpublished private diaries particularly appeal to me because of their lack of self-consciousness. These writers aren't trying to impress any audience at all, which sometimes makes for extremely boring minutia (which is interesting in its own way) and other times reveals unconventional and charming sincerity you won't find in an Instagram post. The diaries as physical objects are also fascinating. Each person's handwriting takes me a few pages to get used to before I can consistently read it. Some, I have never fully cracked. Most of them are pre-dated diaries for a particular year, so the writers only had a specific amount of space to write in for each day. I hesitate to even share this niche hobby for fear that new interest will make for more competitive bidding and the prices will go up. Maybe I need to make it a little harder to indulge my addiction though. Here's a rundown of some of the most interesting and most boring diaries I've read over the last 6 months.

A 1931 diary belonging to a medical worker that was published with every page having snippets of medical history and advertisements for contemporary medicines. I learned from this one that pendants of children were used as protection against hemorrhoids. The writer mentions someone named Phil being sent to a mental hospital, but he seems to be better by Christmas because he's present at dinner.

A 1968 diary that seemed to belong to a depressed music teacher. She wrote frequently about the interpersonal drama going on between her cats. Goldie, Tab, and Angel rotated between being characterized as "a doll" and "a snake," depending on who was bullying whom on any particular day. The writer even drew outlines of her cats paws when they sat on the page.

A 5 year diary of a man who played golf almost every single day. I can't believe anybody not only played golf so consistently, but felt the need to record it for at least 5 years straight. Truly fascinating.

A 1960s diary of a ranch woman who always seemed to be cold and sick and whose sons and husband frequently went into town to get cars to dump into the river. I guess that's just what rural guys did for fun in the 1960s?

A 1920s diary of a secretary with many loose papers tucked in at the back. One paper appears to be a scrap of typing practice of a blithely and shockingly racist poem.

A 1938 diary of a 13 year old girl who enjoyed almost daily tennis lessons, summer camp, and sneaking off with her friends to smoke cigarettes and chew onion grass to hide the smell on their breath.

So many farm diaries. Mostly from old men listing their daily chores, how many eggs their chickens produced, who stopped by to visit.

A 1955 diary of a woman who lived in the same metropolitan area as me. She mentions visiting a cemetery less than a mile from my apartment.

These diaries sometimes feel like the closest thing to a physical manifestation of their authors' souls. I like to think of my bookshelf as slightly haunted by mundane ghosts of boring normal people.