Having a digital library and a note-taking device in my pocket at all times did not make my notes-to-self any more comprehensible. Why, for instance, did I write in 2011, “They’re painting the ceiling of the Rijksmuseum”? Were they painting the ceiling of the Rijksmuseum? Or did I think that was a good line for a story? I have no idea. But I can still parse some of the notes, and taken together they do form a strange kind of autobiography, a way into knowing myself through the lens of what I cared about. Beginning in 2020, I adopted a different note-taking app, leaving Apple’s Notes behind. The Notes app is now, like the marginalia in that old copy of Jane Eyre, a series of relics. Here is one note I wrote for each year of my life with the Notes app.

2019: “Send Manguso quote to Sarah.” More than a dozen of my notes are reminders to send Sarah something—a Donald Hall essay, the catalog for MOCA’s Kerry James Marshall exhibition, or a joke Henry James wrote about adverbs (“the only qualification I really much respect”). I don’t know how much of this stuff I ever actually shared with her, because things in the Notes app had a way of not getting done. I also don’t know which Sarah Manguso quote I was referring to, but it may have been a passage about life in a psychiatric hospital from Manguso’s book Two Kinds of Decay: “The ward was the only true community of equals I have ever lived in. What I mean is that we all knew we had already lived through hell, that our lives were already over, and all we had was the final descent. The only thing to do on the way down was to radiate mercy.”

2018: “Discontinuity of tense and perspective hallmark of your time.” I have no idea what those words mean, but there they are, typed by me in March of 2018 with no further context.

2017: “Driving alone at night is heartbreak without the agony.” I had this thought while driving alone at night, and then I pulled over to write it down, which ruined the feeling.

2016: “No bright line between imagination and memory.” According to my Google calendar, when I wrote this I was at the home of my best friends, Chris and Marina Waters. I suspect Sarah probably said a version of that line in conversation, and then I stole it. At any rate, it ended up in my book Turtles All the Way Down, which is about a kid who is constantly remembering what she imagined and imagining what she remembers.

2015: “This bar has lights everywhere but you can’t see anybody’s face.” I sometimes feel like I can’t properly participate in conversation, because everything I say and hear has to drip through the sieve of my anxiety, and so by the time I understand what someone has just said to me and how I ought to respond, my laughter or whatever seems weirdly delayed. Knowing this will happen makes my anxiety worse, which in turn makes the problem worse. I sometimes deal with it by imagining myself not as part of great conversations but instead as a chronicler of them, so I pull out my phone and take some notes. “This bar has lights everywhere but you can’t see anybody’s face” is something a movie star’s publicist said to my colleague Elyse Marshall when we were all at a hotel bar in Cleveland, Ohio. I liked the line a lot and I’ll probably try to use it in a novel someday.