The private becoming public, the individual subject dividing, and the writer becoming her own reader and vice versa—the diary, an elusive, elastic container, straddles all this and more. Diary writing may be the most private of forms, but when placed within the context of a novel or when it serves, as it does here, for the structure of the novel itself, this form of confession, dating back at least in the Western tradition to Augustine, contradicts its very nature.
