Diarios

Alejandra Pizarnik

2 ideas

1. Writing about not writing

   Pizarnik repeatedly complains in the diary that the novel or sustained prose she wants will not come, and she reproaches herself for laziness and paralysis. Yet she also revised diary fragments and published some of them, so the diary served both as a record of blocked ambition and as literary work in its own right.

2. Depression as recurrence in the diaries

   Read continuously, the diaries show the same complaints returning across years: sleeplessness, the empty afternoon, the vow to change tomorrow and the failure to. Pizarnik herself notices this recurrence and at times judges her diary habit harmful, which makes the illness read more as a repeated pattern than as a single crisis.

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