"It hits pretty close to home," thought this here blog author.

The New Yorker's latest has an interesting essay on diaries, what compels some of us to keep them and what compels others of us to read them. Some of it will resonate with those of us who blog.

Below are a couple of excerpts that made me smile.

The impulse to keep a diary is to actual diaries as the impulse to go on a diet is to actual slimness. Most of us do wish that we were slim diarists.

And:

It obliges you to believe that the stuff that happened to you is worth writing down because it happened to you. This is why so many diaries are abandoned by circa January 10th: keeping this up, you quickly realize, means something worse than being insufferable to others; it means being insufferable to yourself.