Portal to a Forgotten Land: Finding Your Character’s Voice In Old Diaries

I recently found an item that I assumed was lost to time: My “Snog Log.” Snogging, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, is British slang, common in the 90s, for making out. It’s apt for the type of kissing we do as teens, conjuring the wet slugs of tongues, the mouth wiped on the back of the sleeve. Snogging. It sounds like medieval torture.

My Snog Log spans four years of my life, from my first kiss at 13 to 16, when I’m on my 83rd (if we trust in the Snog Log’s accuracy). Each boy (and one girl) is rated out of 10, at least, at the beginning. The kiss is dated and there’s a column for any “notes.” It is delightful, absurd, heartbreaking, an anthropological artifact of teen sexuality, or at least my own.

#8. Gareth. 8/10. 21 yo!!! Town.
#15. Adam. 7/10. Wandering hands.
#45. Joe. Some London geezer TWAT.
#60. Aden. Pierced tongue!

What I exclude from the log is as interesting as what’s on the page. When I lose my virginity at 14 to an 18-year-old who I’ll never see again, I write: Shag etc. German. When an older friend of my sister’s climbs into my bed one night, I write: Scary—interesting.

The snog log is tucked into the back of an old diary. I was a compulsive archivist as a child. I kept notes passed in school, every birthday card I was ever sent, numbers scribbled on napkins from boys I’ve long ago forgotten. And I wrote diaries, starting from as soon as I could hold a pencil. While these are for the most part a litany of boy crushes and girl cruelties, they do offer my adult self material. I returned to this ephemera not as a memoirist in search of past truths, but as a fiction writer trying to access the inner workings of a young girl’s mind.

My debut novel, Amphibian, is a coming-of-age story about girlhood, following two best friends, Sissy and Tegan, navigating their first sexual experiences—until Sissy’s body starts to change in unexpected and terrifying ways. I wrote this book to understand how shame becomes an unwelcome bedfellow to desire. If I could work that out, perhaps I could undo some of its damage.

To do that, I had to return to my own girlhood. And these pages opened the portal.

*

It’s hard to recall our childhood selves without superimposing an adult narrative. I remember my girlhood well, but do I remember what I thought at the time? Or only what it has come to mean over the years? To narrate a story from the perspective of a preteen girl I had to write from a place lacking the benefit of life experience. I toyed with using the third person, but it came off as voyeuristic, distant. I wanted my reader to be embodied, participant to the visceral experience of being a 12-year-old girl. It is a time in life when we’re often dismissed—our thoughts and feelings don’t yet count, and this is a lesson we take with us into womanhood. I wanted to dignify the experience of girlhood with all the brutality and delirium it contains, to give Sissy agency and her subjectivity merit. And to do that, I had to get her voice right.

One journal opens shortly after my 12th birthday. Its spine is threadbare, its pages bulging with keepsakes. On the cover, a parade of clowns. Here I am, on the precipice of adolescence, not yet fully formed. I’m aware of it, too. I’m between being a kid and playing games and stuff and being a teenager and going out and being independent, I write. And later: Growing up is so weird.

As I read, I make notes of anecdotes to use later, many of which will appear in the book. I keep a running list of vocabulary—snazzy, wicked, lush—wondering which words Sissy might use. But mostly I immerse myself. I need to feel what it is to be in a 12-year-old body again. To have 12-year-old thoughts. I discovered this while writing memoir: Spontaneous memories—those that are less rehearsed or anecdotal—are often accompanied by stronger sensory recall. They evoke a phenomenological experience, or, in other words: time travel.

Soon, I’m running through the woods by the weir where we went swimming each summer, my legs whipped by brambles, playing superheroes with my friends. I’m bundled into a sleeping bag with a gaggle of girls staying up until 5am. Told ghost stories, got freaked out. Ate loads of sweets. We had play fights. Talked about how much Rosie and I would have to be paid to snog each other. It was £50!! Started at £1 million. We told each other deep secrets, but I didn’t say about dad. I remember this moment. My longing to share and yet, my capacity for secrecy. I remember one girl’s secret, too, which I didn’t write down, not out of loyalty, but because it involved sex and so belonged to a world for which we weren’t yet ready. We were trying on womanhood for size but we didn’t want the real thing, not yet, and her confession transgressed the safety I still felt then as a girl.

See, I’m not here for facts. Even while I magpie away all this world-building detail; I’m looking for something less tangible than that. How much did we know? When did that knowing change? What was our capacity for understanding? Diaries offer a tool to delineate the scope and potential of adolescent interiority. They track the slow sea change in our awareness of the world around us. This one diary starts with make believe games and sending paper dolls to pen pals; by the end, I’ve broken into a railroad cabin with a friend, two boys, and a bottle of vodka, having lied to my mum about where I was sleeping that night.

I’m measuring the tension between knowing and unknowing. We rang up all these blokes on the internet and had “cybersex” which is just very kinky talk, I write (having still never had a boyfriend). Pervy old men wanting to do pervy things to us. I seem savvy enough, but then: I met a gorgeous guy called Paul on there…he wasn’t like the rest. I give this Paul my postal address and he sends me letters. This episode made it into the novel. I didn’t have to imagine what a pervy old man might write to a preteen girl; I had a record of it.

I live in Diary Tyler’s world. And it can be vicious in here. Girls are called sluts, tarts, slappers—both with cruelty and affectionate jest. They’re called frigid, too, with no irony. We’re learning there’s rules about our desires, and when and with whom we can act on them. But mostly, for now, I’m gleeful. A glutton for life. I want it all, and I want it more than the last time.

I’m not sure I fancy him apart from this feeling in my stomach… I am indiscriminate in my longing. Desperate to kiss a boy, any boy, please, before I turn 13. I’m not reflecting back any longer; I am reexperiencing. Dressed really slutty…got so much attention from blokes, I revel in my newly perceived power. Outside McDonald’s, my hair bleached blonde, smoking cigarettes so the good girls from school will see me and it’s delicious.

We are not our characters, of course. It would be tedious if we were. But we share traits with them, magnified or distorted, sometimes inverted. Sissy and I share an earnestness, a desire to please. And a feeling of being outcast. My mind is in a constant state of turmoil. It could be puberty but, well, I don’t know what to think. Her voice is not my own but it exists in the same orbit. Is this a stage all 12-year-olds go through? Or am I just weird? I can hear her ask the same question, I can hear her reply. She tags along to the park to drink vodka with the boys in the bushes. I pass her a cigarette to see if she’ll smoke. She’s eavesdropping from the desk behind me as we gossip about this one girl who gave her boyfriend a blowie, and she doesn’t approve. She is with me when we play truth or dare. Tell me your secrets, I dare her. Our boundaries collapse, passing notes back and forth in the classroom; it’s her reflection in the mirror. Tell me everything, I urge her, and she tells me it all.

*

First person narrative is always an artifice. Pretty sentences, passages of observation, none of it is how we really think. This is all the more true when conjuring an adolescent narrator. But by capturing the scope of her knowing, the scope of her feeling, the reader has the tools to believe in her. Once I find Sissy’s voice, it stays with me. But so does my girlhood self.

I don’t stop reading when Diary Tyler turns 14, despite having no real reason to keep going. She loses her virginity to that German. “Scary-interesting” climbs into her bed. I read through the escalating cycles of rapture and despair that follow. Soon the giddiness is all gone. I’m weak, I’m a slut. And later, Why do I do it? It makes me feel terrible…I wish I wasn’t such a whore. I don’t know what I’m looking for any longer but I can’t turn away. 

I land on a question scribbled in red ink: Who blames me? Blame is an assignment of wrongdoing; I wanted to know why I felt at fault. That is 16-year-old Tyler now, wrangling with the same shame I’m trying to understand today.

It is no linguistic error that to be shameless is a crime. Shame is built into the stories we are told as girls and the stories we go on to share as women. It is passed down through centuries, through generations. It teaches us that our sexuality must be conditioned.

I realize then that I’m writing this book for her, for my 12-year-old self, as much as for anyone. For everything she was about to experience and everything I wish I could have protected her from. Who blames me? I asked. No one, I wish I could answer. You are free of blame which is also the same as being shame-less.

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Amphibian by Tyler Wetherall is available from Ig Publishing.