The teenage diary is an alluring thing, and not just because it smells of dewberry. It gives off a subliminal high-pitched wail wherever it's hidden, be it under a pillow or inside a desk. It was inside my desk, a thick wire-bound notebook with the word PRIVATE pasted on the front, when, in 1990, my teacher Mr Spector confiscated it. Eventually he went to the loo, and I got a friend to watch the door while I frantically ran to his drawer, and ripped out as many pages as I could grab, including those where I'd Pritt Sticked in the leaflet from a Tampax box. The two times I've ever been honest in a diary, it's been read by the person I've written about. Later that day, Mr Spector read extracts out loud to the class, and then phoned my mum to tell her not only that I'd been insubordinate to him in print but that my diary contained the word "fuck". I have never hated a person more.
DreamWorks has just bought the film rights to the diary of Maya Van Wagenen, an American 15-year-old. I trust they didn't steal it from her desk. I love the idea that, maybe, they'd heard from Priya S, who'd heard from Emily M, who'd heard from Blonde Emily who knows everything, that Maya's diary was juicy. Except, maybe, after a journey that involved barter and humiliation, when Spielberg finally got his hands on the diary, he opened it to find she'd written it in code. Disaster!
Though details of the diary's journey to DreamWorks is shadowy, the content is fairly cinematic. When she was 11, Maya's family moved to a Texan border town, and in an attempt to make friends she followed the tips from a 1950s popularity guide, with painful and "profound" results.
If my diary had been published, perhaps after being discovered fossilised in a subsided Design Technology hut, the story arc would have been significantly less Hollywood. One entry I remember vividly was a pencil sketch of two people slow-dancing at a bar mitzvah, captioned with REM lyrics. Another was a jealous list of topics I thought my friends might be writing in their diaries. I was too aware of the page. Too conscious of the DreamWorks possibilities, and the weight of the thing – the knowledge that by documenting the horror of being 13 I was admitting it was important.
But mainly my diaries were failures because of that contradiction: there was nothing compelling me to write something that nobody would read, yet when I did write down secrets – my lists of loves, likes and hates – the threat that they might be found, even after my death, even after my tea, was so acute and so crushing that I'd scribble over them in Biro that ripped through two pages.
I often wish I could be a teenager again so this time I could do it properly. At art college I did a project where I wrote a series of fake teenage diaries. Some were quite as dull as my real attempts, and some were more lyrical and thoughtful, the way I imagined other people's might have been, people with insight, and boyfriends. I sold them through small ads in the Argus, advertised as "Used". Soon I got a letter from the newspaper informing me that the listing had been removed, and also that I was being investigated by police.
Diaries have such power. Power to bear the weight of a thousand secrets, and to make you hate a man, and to make a 15-year-old the youngest non-actor to ever make a feature deal at DreamWorks. I wonder if one day Maya Van Wagenen will feel the way I do now about my teenage diaries – like they're black boxes of my worst times ever, artefacts of intense embarrassment. But much of the force of the diary is in the fact that it remains private, a secret with yourself. I hope Hollywood doesn't rinse all agony from the thing. I hope they manage to keep at least a half page, at least a line of that power.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk. Follow Eva on Twitter @EvaWiseman
