I don't want to go all meta on you, but as often happens, elements of possible answers suggested themselves over the following days mostly in random things I'd been reading. I serve these snippets up to you fragmented and raw, with no synthesis or mashing together to create a more coherent answer than the title of the Dana song above.
If you are on of those who still think of weblogs as "online diaries" or, as Tony Blair's former chief policy adviser Matthew Taylor put it ...that they are merely packed with a "shrill discourse of demands" and "a perpetual state of self-righteous rage", then you have evidently been reading the wrong ones. (TLS)
Gunn has two young daughters... and she finds that she cannot contemplate shutting a study door on them. Instead, she wishes to situate herself at a desk on the landing where she can hear everything, "the clattering, the quiet, the doorbell, the calls for help, "Mum! Mummy!" And on her landing, she decides, she will "make a different kind of writing altogether... A genre that at this moment doesn't even exist." 44 Things is the result of this manifesto: 44 pieces, one for each year she's lived - snatched from her domestic life...all of which arise from the textures and priorities of her life at home, which, she says, "is a good life, an interesting life and deserves to be written about." (Scottish Review of Books)
Decca was a natural letter writer. Born at a time when it was usual to spend part of every day writing letters, into a family for whom letters were a crucial means of communication, she wrote constantly: to her many friends, ... to her husband and children, whenever she was apart from them; to strangers who wrote to her; and to her editor, Robert Gottlieb. Her letters, in which memories of the past and particularly her childhood returned again and again, are direct, full of energy and laughter. TLS
...all take writing seriously, and hence feel the need to highlight the significance of diaristic writing to ward off the charge of futility, navel-gazing and irrelevance diairists have long been the butt of. .... Writing thus becomes a way of taming the formlessness of experience, a formlessness which prefigures that of death. (V. Serfaty)
