The diaries of minimalist sculptor and painter Anne Truitt have been admired by writers from Rachel Kushner to Zadie Smith and Maria Popova. Daybook - the first of four published journals - represents Truitt’s attempts to come to terms with herself both as a person and as an artist. A process sparked by retrospectives of her work at the Whitney and the Corcoran. It opens in 1974, Truitt’s existence is now a stark contrast to what came before. During the fifties and sixties, she was married to then-prominent journalist James Truitt, trailing him from one assignment to the next including to Tokyo where he worked for Newsweek; in America she routinely engaged in supporting his position, entertaining politicians and celebrities including Truman Capote, Marcel Duchamp and Dylan Thomas. But when Truitt’s journal opens she’s divorced, a process complicated by James Truitt's spectacular fall from grace linked to his reporting of the relationship between Truitt’s friend, and fellow artist, Mary Pinchot Meyer and John F. Kennedy - Mary’s later murder invited speculations about a possible assassination.

Although Truitt alludes to her time with her husband, she doesn’t provide much detail about this period, which seems strange since numerous passages are devoted to anecdotes from her past. A delving into memory that gives the impression she sees herself partly as stalled and partly as a work in progress: a woman alone in her fifties, sole support for three teenagers, who’s frantically engaged in constructing an identity outside of her ex’s shadow. Not that relationships between husbands and wives don’t figure here, there’s a series of rueful recognitions that expectations - instilled in countless women of her generation - of men and marriage as safe havens were pure fantasy. Although the fact that she ever viewed marriage as a path to security seems contradictory given her forceful portrayal of the fractured relationship between her own parents - made more so by her mother’s fragile mental state, her father’s dependence on alcohol, and the impact of the Great Depression on their once-secure household.

Memories of childhood pervade the journal, partly because Truitt’s now close to the age her mother was when she died, stirring up long-buried emotions and sparking fears of mortality. But at the same time there’s a sense of movement and creativity, reinvention seems intrinsic to Truitt’s history. It’s laced with sudden shifts and swerves. Her university education was initially derailed by a burst appendix – recuperation consisted of sports at a psychiatric hospital where she played volleyball with Zelda Fitzgerald – then she moved between studying psychology and nursing during WW2 to writing poetry to marriage, motherhood and to making art. Now she’s close to reclusive, severed from the art community, her work in a garden studio competes with caring for her children. There are brief spells elsewhere, the well-known Yaddo retreat offers a chance of silence, and care that reminds her of being a small child. But there’s always an underlying tension between her selfhood, her role as a mother, her creative desires and the wider demands of an increasingly commercial art world. A tension intensified by recurring periods of overwhelming financial precarity.

Alongside the more personal, intimate aspects of Truitt’s journal are insightful reflections on art and gender, on the role of art in wider society and the mismatch between artists and the perceptions of their audiences. Truitt’s fluid entries combine to provide a tantalising snapshot of a woman too unconventional to be fully subsumed by postwar domesticity, yet cut off from the growing feminist rebellion brewing elsewhere in 1970s America. It’s a fascinating glimpse of the experiences and struggles of the woman artist in an era dominated by men. But it’s also a sobering one, since so much remains all-too-familiar from the shouldering of responsibility for everyone around her to feelings akin to imposter syndrome to aging, vulnerability, and growing invisibility. This edition comes with an introduction by Celia Paul.

I am always interested in the stories of artists and craftspeople, specially women. My husband and I have done life story projects with creative people, so I was delighted to read this book. It's a journal of self-discovery, written by artist Anne Truitt over the course of a year from 1974-75 and somewhat more sporadically from 1978-80. It's a joy to read about her voyage of self-discovery as she integrates parts of herself that she had compartmentalized before. The process of writing helped her make connections and see things in new ways. She muses on her marriage (which had ended by the time she started writing), her roles as a single parent, artist, breadwinner, her art and the (sometimes vehement and angry) response to it, her ability to juggle everything, her time in Japan, and her life in general.

The book is part memoir, part creative exploration, part commentary on societal expectations. I found it fascinating on all those levels. It was a wonderful read from start to finish.

Daybook is a classic work about reconciling the call of creative work with the demands of daily life.
Renowned American artist Anne Truitt kept this illuminating and inspiring journal over a period of seven years, determined to come to terms with the forces that shaped her art and life. Her range of sensitivity--moral, intellectual, sensual, emotional, and spiritual-- is remarkably broad. She recalls her childhood on the eastern shore of Maryland, her career change from psychology to art, and her path to a sculptural practice that would "set color free in three dimensions." She reflects on the generous advice of other artists, watches her own daughters' journey into motherhood, meditates on criticism and solitude, and struggles to find the way to express her vision. Resonant and true, encouraging and revelatory, Anne Truitt guides herself--and her readers--through a life in which domestic activities and the needs of children and friends are constantly juxtaposed against the world of color and abstract geometry to which she is drawn in her art.

Beautifully written and a rare window on the workings of a creative mind, Daybook showcases an extraordinary artist whose insights generously and succinctly illuminate the artistic process.