Even when she was fourteen, she rued her tendency to primp for future biographers: “If I could just stop writing for posterity for a minute and make sense!!!”6 In an essay from 1962, Sontag asked why writers’ journals are interesting, and part of her answer was that in the journal “we read the writer in the first person; we encounter the ego behind the masks of ego.” She must have known how extreme an example her own journals would furnish of the distance between the ego and its masks. But: “Is that what is always wanted, truth?” she asked in 1963.
