Mark Bostridge
Love among the Paperbacks
A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt
By Simon Garfield (ed)
Canongate 712pp £20 order from our bookshop
‘Must we document everything?’ exclaims Greta Gerwig, heroine of Noah Baumbach’s recent film Mistress America, when someone takes a casual snap of her on a mobile phone. Tweets, emails and instant photography allow us to keep constant track of our lives and to bombard the outside world with the details. But one wonders what effect 21st-century social media is having on the production of the conventional diary. Will such records eventually go the way of the handwritten letter?
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