I, Mary Maclane: A Diary of Human Days
In 1902, a nineteen-year-old girl in Butte, Montana sat down to write a diary and accidentally invented a genre. The result sold one hundred thousand copies in its first month, made Mary MacLane a household name, and was called 'the devil's book' by horrified critics who couldn't believe a young woman had written with such ferocious honesty about desire, loneliness, and the hunger to be understood. MacLane's prose doesn't perform vulnerability or seek approval. It stares directly into the void of her own consciousness with an intensity that feels startlingly modern, even now. She writes about her body, her boredom, her contempt for the people around her, and her desperate, contradictory need for connection. The diary is set in the gray mining town of Butte, a place she despises and cannot leave, but the real landscape is internal: the war between her enormous ego and her crushing isolation, between her intelligence and her despair. This is not a cheerful book, but it is an electrifying one. MacLane refused to soften herself for the reader, and in doing so, she created something that feels less like a historical artifact and more like a secret window into a brilliant, difficult, utterly alive young mind.
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“I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel”
— Mary MacLane
“May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity”
— Mary MacLane
“Some people say that beauty is a curse. It may be true, but I'm sure I should not have at all minded being cursed a little.””
— Mary MacLane
“I consider calmly the question of how much evil I should need to kill off my finer feelings…””
— Mary MacLane
“Are there many things in this cool-hearted world so utterly exquisite as the pure love of one woman for another woman?””
— Mary MacLane
“If it please the Devil, one day I may have happiness. That will be all-sufficient. I shall then analyze no more. I shall be a different being.But meanwhile I shall eat.””
— Mary MacLane
“Some day the Devil will come to me and say: 'Come with me.'And I will answer: 'Yes.””
— Mary MacLane
“I shall have to miss forever some beautiful, wonderful things because of that wretched, lonely childhood. There will always be a lacking, a wanting -- some dead branches that never grew leaves. It is not deaths and murders and plots and wars that make life tragedy. It is day after day, and year after year, and Nothing. It is a sunburned little hand reached out and Nothing put into it.””
— Mary MacLane
“It is day after day. It is week after week. It is month after month. It is year after year. It is only time going and going. There is no joy. There is no lightness of heart. It is only the passing of days. I am young and alone.””
— Mary MacLane
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MacLane, Mary. I, Mary Maclane: A Diary of Human Days. Lex, lex-books.com/book/i-mary-maclane-a-diary-of-human-days-2690519e-238d-43f4-bc2c-19540ad2775e.MacLane, M. (n.d.). I, Mary Maclane: A Diary of Human Days. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/i-mary-maclane-a-diary-of-human-days-2690519e-238d-43f4-bc2c-19540ad2775eMacLane, Mary. I, Mary Maclane: A Diary of Human Days. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/i-mary-maclane-a-diary-of-human-days-2690519e-238d-43f4-bc2c-19540ad2775e.
