From the shadowlands

A New Zealand playwright once labelled New York's best-kept secret is rising to prominence again with the release of his diaries.

- ERIC TRUMP

A writer's published diaries tend to occupy the literary shadowlands. Self-revelation mingles with self-deception; shoals of mundanity give way to depths of introspection. In his radiantly anguished journals, American author John Cheever's "I wake... mount my wife, eat my eggs, walk my dogs" shares the pages with, "In the little skin of light on the water, I saw a bat hunting." They're a topiary genre, the emotional and intellectual life pruned to the sensibility a writer wishes to present. Virginia Woolf wanted hers to be "loose knit", but certainly not "slovenly".For Susan Sontag, the journal was for self-expression and self-creation. Whatever the artifice, an author's diary retains an aura of the authentic, tempting one to read it as the final word on that life. "Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point," American journalist Joan Didion instructs herself, and us.

Robert Needham Lord, one of New Zealand's leading playwrights and the author of more than 20 plays for radio, television and stage, among them Well Hung, Bert & Maisy and Joyful and Triumphant, was also a prolific diarist. His plays reveal him to be at once an astute observer of New Zealand's suffocating "half-gallon, quarter-acre pavlova paradise" and a subversive pioneer who cultivated a queer perspective at a time when sex between men was illegal.

Like other self-documentarians, he pondered the genre as he wrote it, wondering, "Are diaries an act of narcissism or self-torture?" At times, the diaries were a "stab for posterity or something"; at others, "a device for gaining perspective on one's own behaviour, not a window for strangers". That he donated his diaries, plus letters, photographs and manuscripts, to the Hocken Collections in Dunedin suggests he may have wanted a stranger or two to read them.