And Margaret, when furtively reading her own diaries years later, finds her metamorphosis quite inexplicable: "If only I could remember," she wails, "what happened in those four years between the ages of eleven and fifteen that are such a mystery to me".
"I started keeping a diary twenty-five yeago ago," Manguso writes.
The blog search engine Technorati now tracks 49 million sites, but when Tom Coates started his online diary seven years ago there were fewer than 600 other bloggers.
Held in Guantánamo since 2002, despite never being charged with a crime, Slahi began to write a diary three years into his captivity.
Majd's Diary: Two Years in the Life of a Saudi Girl by Radio Diaries Duration: 33 minutes Listen here / Subscribe here Come for Majd's honesty, stay for her charisma.
"I am not much good to anyone and Vidia is probably, almost certainly, right when he says I have nothing to offer him," she wrote in her diary, many years on in their marriage.
Malala Yousafzai was just 11 when she was writing her diary, two years after the Taliban took over the Swat Valley, and ordered girls' schools to close.
She was just 11 when she started her diary, two years after the Taliban took over the Swat Valley and ordered girls' schools to close.
But a fixed-term parliament meant the date of 7 May 2015 has been in the diary for years, leading to talk about whether voters have already made up their minds, or whether votes are still up for grabs.
As he wrote in his diary some years later: "[She], less idealistic than I, but more human, recalled me from my intellectual isolation and made me return to my fellows".
"My mother gave me her private diaries — 20 years' worth.
