Ten Amazing Novels That Begin “Dear Diary”

Confessions of a High School Disaster, by Emma Chastain
The diary novel lives or dies on the narrator’s voice. Nail the voice, and your story is golden. Chastain has so nailed the voice of high school freshman-cum-disaster Chloe Snow, you would be forgiven for thinking you’re reading a real diary Chastain stole from some poor teenage girl (except few real teens are so insightful, or hilarious). Like Mean Girls updated for the 2010s and seasoned with a dash of adolescent misery, Chloe’s story involves the impossible crush, the selfish mother, the best frenemy, and the annoying tendency towards complete and total physical virginity. All-in-all, your basic freshman year nightmare. Chloe’s thinks the sort of things you want to tweet (not that kids are on Twitter), hoping takes your plagiarism for cleverness.

Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes
If you’re going to read this classic novel, block out some extra time for open weeping. Charlie Gordon, a man with an IQ of 68, is chosen to be the first human subject for an experimental procedure to increase mental capacity, a procedure already tested on a lab mouse named Algernon. The experiment is a success, but Charlie’s diary-like lab reports chronicle nothing but pain and suffering triggered by his new abilities and self-awareness. Worse, Charlie, who keeps Algernon in his apartment, discovers a flaw in the theory that dooms them both to lose their new mental powers. As he declines, Charlie tries to find peace, but his final entry, addressed to the woman he loves, will break your heart.

Dracula, by Bram Stoker
Stoker’s classic novel has been filmed so many times, many don’t realize it was originally told through a series of diary entries and letters (plus a few newspaper clippings filling in background material). Stoker’s genius is using these formats to limit the awareness of his characters, ratcheting up tension as the reader realizes they know more than the characters. The result is an air of claustrophobic, gothic horror that has keep us reading for centuries.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid, by Jeff Kinney
It would be easy to dismiss Kinney’s literary empire as “books for kids,” but that wouldn’t give credit where it’s due. The Wimpy Kid series is a pitch-perfect recreation of a kid’s voice and concerns, including the obstacle course of humiliations and the simple meanness of other children—things often forgotten as we grow into ourselves as adults.

Dangling Man, by Saul Bellow
Bellow’s first novel is often dismissed as “apprentice work” by modern critics, but it’s a remarkably accomplished nonetheless. Readers at the time didn’t care for the largely plot-free story of Joseph, communicated in a series of philosophical diary entries, as he waits to be drafted for World War II. But Bellow’s skill as a writer is on full display, and his pondering of existence and the necessity of everyday efforts still resonates with anyone uncertain about the future.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Anita Loos
Loos’ hilarious jazz-age novel remains one of the most undeservedly forgotten books of the 20th century. Written as a diary, complete with (frequently very funny) misspellings and misapprehensions, it’s difficult not to hear Marilyn Monroe’s voice as you read Lorelei Lee’s misadventures, which she lays down after a friend tells her that her life would make an interesting book. Lee’s simultaneous ability to manipulate the men around her while remaining charming and funny makes this a timeless story—despite its less-than feminist themes.

I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith
Smith, best-known for The Hundred and One Dalmations, penned I Capture the Castle during World War II while living in California and pining for her home. It is told form the point of view of Cassandra Mortmain, whose family is living in “genteel poverty.” With a 40-year lease on a drafty, crumbling castle, the family has a extravagant place to live, but no money to live on. As Cassandra relates the adventures of the family from her own point of view, Smith manages to present a way of life that’s simultaneously poor and very rich.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence, by Jack Womack
Womack’s 1993 novel should have made a big splash, considering his award-winning work up to that point, but it was largely ignored (some blame the garish cover). The diary of 12-year old Lola, who goes from a sheltered girl attending a tony private school in Manhattan to a streetwise gangster as a near-future American society falls apart around her spins a frighteningly plausible story of decline—one that resonates even more sharply today.

The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Gilman’s 1892 short story isn’t a novel, but it is one of the most frightening and skillfully-written diary stories ever published. The narrator is a young mother who is forced to take a “rest cure” by her husband, and her descent into madness is terrifying in part because it is the result of prevailing male attitudes of the time. This assumption of weakness served as the motivation for harmful, dismissive treatments and diagnoses such as “hysteria”—but any woman who has been gaslighted or patronized in the modern day will feel the power of this story.

Z for Zacharia, by Robert C. O’Brien
O’Brien’s 1974 novel is composed of the diary entries of a teenage girl, Ann, who has survived a nuclear holocaust due to the unusual—but plausible—geographical properties of her farm. Initially she believes she is the only survivor, and when a man wearing an experimental radiation suit arrives she’s fearful, then excited. As the man, Loomis, becomes increasingly controlling, Ann begins to plot her escape in what is one of the most compelling apocalyptic sci-fi stories of the modern age.