Reading Journal 5 || Joan Didion || "On Keeping a Notebook"

1. This essay made me feel as if I should have kept a notebook for myself earlier, so that I could remember all the details whether it was an important or an unimportant fact and event that occurred in my life. In her essay, "On Keeping a Notebook", Joan Didion states, "It all comes back. Even that recipe for sauerkraut: even that brings it back. I was on Fire Island when I first made that sauerkraut, and it was raining, and we drank a lot of bourbon and ate the sauerkraut and went to bed at ten, and I listened to the rain and the Atlantic and felt safe. I made the sauerkraut again last night and it did not make me feel any safer, but that is, as they say, another story" (4). This last paragraph of her essay sends an important message. As life passes by, we slowly start to forget who we were in the past and what we did; memories slowly slip away. When we write these memories down, it is a way to reconnect with ourselves from the past and recall the moments that have been forgotten.
2. The third paragraph contributed the best emotional connection for me as a reader. This is because she talks about how the notebook keepers are different types of people, they are not normal, instead they are lonely and always anxious. She also talks about how she started to write in a notebook. This paragraph connected to me as a reader because I went through the same feeling, and understood who she was talking about when she said notebook keepers. 
3. Didion asks many unanswerable questions, and this technique strengthens her work by keeping the reader thinking about what is the main point of keeping a notebook for yourself? She lets the readers reflect upon this specific question, so that they could stay focused on the question Joan Didion is trying to answer.