Her name is Kate. She is the one everybody calls, and has been for as long as she can remember. Somewhere along the way she started writing down what she actually thinks. It turned out to be a great deal more than anybody had asked her for.
The Dirty Little Diary is a diary in fiction, twice a week. One entry arrives free every Thursday. Sunday's is locked, written in full, and read aloud in her own voice for the people who would rather hear it.
It is written for anyone who holds everything and is never held. Who is long past needing permission to want anything, who has excellent taste and no patience left for being written down to. There is a great deal of writing about women at this stage of life. Most of it is about loss. This is not that.
Wanting, told honestly. Attraction that never had the decency to fade on schedule. Dinner parties with an undertow. Letters never sent, conversations reconstructed at two in the morning by a woman who remembers precisely what was said and precisely how it was said.
It is grown up and it is knowing and it is often very funny. It is suggestive rather than graphic. The heat is in what she notices and what she declines to spell out, which is a far older trick than the alternative and works considerably better.
Every person in this diary is invented. Every name, every conversation, every voicemail, every room.
That is not fine print. It is how the thing is built. There is no real person in these pages to recognise, protect, or expose, because there is no real person in these pages. The characters are composites and inventions, assembled the way any novelist assembles them.
What is true is the interior weather. The specific texture of still wanting things you were assured you would be finished with by now. The diary is honest about that and fictional about everything else, which is the arrangement most good fiction runs on.
The free entry comes every Thursday. Read it in the Substack app if you can, which is quieter and better looking than an inbox. Email works too.
The locked pages arrive on Sundays with the subscription, fifteen dollars a month or a hundred and fifty for the year. Every locked entry is also narrated and delivered to a private audio feed that plays in whatever app you already use.
Letters are welcome and occasionally answered. letters@dirtylittlediary.com