Diary of an Ordinary Woman

After I had read my first Margaret Forster, Lady's Maid, I was interested to read more of her writing. I saw this one in a charity shop and seized hold of it, took it home, and started it straight away. It starts with a few pages of introduction, telling how she had been contacted by a woman somewhere in the English countryside, writing on behalf of her 98 year old aunt. This lady had been keeping diaries since she was a young girl, and was now interested to see if anyone wanted to publish them. So MF agreed to go down and meet her and have a look at the material. The book, she goes on to say, was the result. Great, thought I, I love real life diaries. And I started to read. Fascinating stuff, enthralling etc -- yes, an ordinary life, but I was grabbed from the start by this girl and her lively, interesting mind. But when I'd got less than 100 pages in, I looked properly at the cover for the first time and saw what I hadn't noticed at first, the tiny words in the bottom right hand corner: 'A Novel'. Hang on... I then turned to the back and discovered an afterword by Forster explaining that, although the opening of the intro was  true, the family had decided against giving her the diaries, so she had invented them. I felt curiously cheated. Of course once I really looked at the cover I saw that on the back, too, there are blurbs clearly describing this as a novel. But it was such a strange experience, reading as if it were fact and finding it was fiction, that I put it aside for several weeks and read lots of other things instead. I started it again a few days ago and have just finished it, and enjoyed it enormously. And it made me reflect in a general way on diaries vs novels. Novels are supposed to have plots, and structure, and, unless, I suppose, they are wildly post-modern, a beginning middle and end of an identifiable kind. But a diary, even one kept over a very long life, just sort of rambles on. It's always going to be more or less in the present tense, or if not, recounting events that have only just taken place. It does not have to be going anywhere, really, or at least not anywhere particularly significant. Characters can appear, and disappear, and not reappear at all. And yet.... Over her nearly 90 years of diary keeping, Millicent develops so vividly as a character. She lives through the whole of the twentieth century, witnessing two world wars (and losing many loved ones in the process). She longs to go to university but never does, becoming first a school teacher and later a social worker. She starts off very a-political but gradually becomes more politicised, or at least interested in political events, with age. She is an intensely private person, so the way she seems to her family and friends is not by any means the way she is when alone with her diary and her thoughts. Seen by many as a prim maiden aunt, she is in fact very passionate and has two intense love affairs, the second one of long duration -- a marriage in all but name -- with a man who can't marry her because his wife will not divorce him. She has a miscarriage and never conceives again but ends up as a mother to her twin nephew and niece whose parents and siblings are killed in the war. People are born, people die. People change, and some who she dislikes become friends, others who she likes become less appealing to her. She retains her health and energy into her long old age. That's it, really -- but how rivetting it all is.