Keeping a Notebook by Joan

¶ … Keeping a Notebook by Joan Didon [...] cause and effect reflected in the essay. Perhaps the most compelling example of cause and effect in this essay is the note that Didon received her first notebook when she was just five years old. Clearly, it had an effect on her young life. She spent nearly her entire life writing in a notebook and creating unusual stories and characters, and so her mother's gift had a great effect on her life. The cause was her mother's gift, and the effect was her eventual writing career. Didon's notebook is not a journal or diary, and she recognizes the difference. She writes, "So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking" (Didon). The notebook has always been a place for her to create stories and unreal situations that lend themselves to fiction.

Another cause and effect of Didon's notebook are the memories she chooses to record there. Often, she makes them up, rather than basing them in reality, and they change her memories of events and family get-togethers. She notes the often say, "That's simply not true,' the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event" (Didon). Her mind does not record events the way they happened, it records events as she would like to see them happen, and this is very distressing to many of the people around her. So, her notebook causes her to change or bend her own reality into something more pleasing or more memorable. The cause and effect is that it causes others to question her memories, but it adds details and interest to her writings when she incorporates these unreal memories. "Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me" (Didon). She indicates that reality is not nearly as important to her as the ideas and memories she has created in her notebook, and she does not understand why others are so bound to what "really" happened.

Didon notes the effect of these often false memories on her own mind. She writes, "Might not Mrs. Minnie S. Brooks help me to remember what I am? Might not Mrs. Lou Fox help me to remember what I am not?" (Didon). This is cause and effect at its best, for the bits of memories she writes down cause her to think hard about her own life and what she is attempting to do with it. She is lost in memories of earlier times as she wades through the entries that do not seem to make any sense, and they "cause" her to write this essay, sharing these bits and pieces with the world. The effect of her writing, and the memories in her notebook, is to encourage others to do the same, in hopes of someday discovering her creativity and storytelling abilities.

Ultimately, the cause and effect of reading this essay is to understand a little bit more about the author, but to gain understanding of our own motives in keeping a notebook, as well. Didon thinks keeping a notebook is a selfish or self-adsorbed act, because ultimately, it is all about what "I" see, feel, hear, and experience. Thus, keeping a notebook is an utterly selfish and self-serving act. However, as she reads her old entries, they inspire her to write, and this is the reason she keeps the notebook in the first place. Reading causes her to remember, even if the memories are false, and they inspire her creations. The notebook is its own cause and effect in a way, because the effect of the entries is more creativity and poetic license in her works.