On Thursday night I was feeling sleepy and wanted to read myself to sleep, but I didn’t want to get the Harry Potter book out of my car, so I just picked up an old favorite: Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem.

The essay “On Keeping A Notebook” was the inspiration for the title “What Some Would Call Lies.”

I have read and re-read that essay so many times, I imagine that I know it more intimately than Didion herself does.

So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best. What is this business about “shopping, typing piece, dinner with E, depressed”? Shopping for what? Typing what piece? Who is E? Was this “E” depressed, or was I? Who cares?

In fact I have abandoned altogether that kind of pointless entry; instead I tell what some would call lies.

Read the entire essay here.

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