“This story does not start at the same old party.
I would have to be the same old girl for that.”
Nancy Lemann has always kept a diary.
In a recent interview with Snowden Wright for the Oxford American, Lemann calls herself a “hideously copious journal keeper,” and when Wright asks her about the books that influenced her in the writing of her celebrated first novel, Lives of the Saints, she doesn’t mention Walker Percy, or Evelyn Waugh, or any of the other novelists so often cited as her literary lodestars. She tells him it is her own journals.
“That’s where I get my material and my ideas,” Lemann says. “I look back at them for drama, for a skeleton of something.”
It’s also where she finds her voice, she says, that distinctly Lemann syntax with its kind of syrupy front porch cadence and quirky capitalization, those hazy, humid constructions, the subtle epiphanies, those near-Biblical, incantatory repetitions — all those breakdowns, that wastrel youth, mothers drinking vodka at the kitchen table in a black slip.
“When I’m rereading my journals to find out what I think and what I did, I also find out what my style is, [what it is] when nobody’s watching me … Instead of just starting on a blank page, I have to find out, remember, who I really am from my journals.”
The most recent manifestation of this style, and of that penchant for revisiting a past version of herself, is Lemann’s latest novel, The Oyster Diaries. Published in April by New York Review of Books, it was released in tandem with the re-issue of Lives of the Saints, also by NYRB, and Ritz of the Bayou — Lemann’s nonfiction account of the trial of former Louisiana governor, Edwin Edwards — by South Carolina-based Hub City Press.
The Oyster Diaries gives us our semi-autobiographical heroine, Delery Anhalt, a middle-aged woman contending with the passage of time, a woman haunted by the promises of her past, “haunted by a nameless dread … it was the future brewing.”
Delery is at a crossroads, confronting the indignities of midlife — adult children drifting further away, overbearing in-laws, the slow decline of aging parents, a decades-long marriage on the brink of collapse despite her being “the perfect wife … since I have no needs and am easily suffocated and am not suffocating.”
Like much of the Lemann oeuvre, the chronology of The Oyster Diaries is loose and looping, characterized by languid back and forth slips in time, between Delery’s distant memories and more recent recollections and insights. But it’s anchored at the beginning and end by two epistolary sections, collections of fictional journal entries written between 2021 and 2023.
As with Lemann herself, Delery’s diaries — and indeed the whole ofthe novel — serve as a sight of recollection and collision.
They serve as a recollection of Delery’s past from the vantage of the present, a collision between a woman in the later decades of her life and the hopeful, heedless girl she used to be — a girl who, in her “decadent youth,” had “continually emerged unscathed from drunken boating accidents.” A girl who “went on dates with total strangers,” each one breaking her heart in “different yet hauntingly similar ways.” A girl who fell in love with beautiful, tragic men who were “hell-bent” but “sublime.”
Early on in the novel, we find present-day Delery making contact with this girl, this former self, in the pages of old notebooks that she kept when she was in her 20s, found while she was rifling through old papers.
“I found the person/girl who wrote them to be shockingly unpleasant and ridiculous and lame,” Delery says. “Other times I saw her quiet, unsung deeds. And my heart bled for her.”
In this scene, we see Delery caught in the tension between a current cynicism and a deep empathy for her younger self, a kind of wistful longing for that self and an adult pragmatism that knows she can’t go back — and maybe doesn’t want to.
Delery, and Lemann by proxy, does this over and over again throughout the book, delivering to the reader subtly blinding and beautiful insights about age and grief, time and memory that she can only come to and make sense of by conjuring again and again the young woman she used to be.
From the book’s first section of diary entries: “Twenty years ago when I moved to Washington and went to Don Giovanni I did not know I was destined for a decade of increasing heartaches culminating in a bonanza of heartache that ultimately calibrated my soul with insight my soul had been waiting for its whole life.”
She continues, “There’s a feeling that the young have their battles to fight and dreams to achieve and you have already fought and achieved yours. But what then?”
Later, toward the end of the book, thinking about Claude Collier — a character from Delery’s past and Lemann’s, as he first appeared in Lives of the Saints — she says, “And how had such a worldly and forbearing girl, who always forgave him so easily his excesses, devolved into someone wearing a shroud and carrying a sign that said REPENT? This is a question age asks looking back on her younger self.”
It all calls to mind Joan Didion’s seminal essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” in which Didion writes, “I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
Some critics have said that The Oyster Diaries is the weakest of the Saints, Ritz, Diaries triptych. Perhaps they are wishing for the writer Lemann used to be, a young girl newly home from college, who from her own journals discovered a skeleton of something and from them bore a Southern heroine’s coming-of-age the likes of which we rarely see in fiction.
But The Oyster Diaries could never be that earlier book, that younger, past version of itself. It’s been 40 years. Its characters have lived a whole life and of course, so has Lemann. The big, existential questions Louise contended with in Saints, Delery can now begin to answer, or at least better understand, in Diaries. Indeed, Lemann’s latest book succeeds because we get echoes of the writer Lemann was, with her syntactical quirks, that vibe-y, impressionistic prose, the evocative, sensuous descriptions of her beloved New Orleans, alongside a sharper clarity, a truer point of view, and lived wisdom we can believe because it’s come to her with age and time.
The book’s gorgeous profundities, the stunning, staggering revelations and realizations revealed by Delery throughout can only be reached by a character who continues to be curious and empathetic toward her former self, who isn’t afraid to mine her own past for answers to new questions about love and loss and marriage and parenting and death. And they can only be this powerfully rendered by a writer who has done this work herself, who remains on nodding terms with the girl she used to be.
“I had an epiphany one morning in the courtyard of an ancient music conservatory laden with the grime of centuries while someone played ‘The Italian Concerto’ by Bach on a glorious old piano,” says Delery at the end of Part One of The Oyster Diaries, lost in another recollection, another reverie. “I burst into tears, and thanked God for reminding me of who I am — a person transfixed by beauty, sobbing — and prayed to be that person again. My prayer was answered, for there in that ancient courtyard, I met that same odd girl I once was and reunited with her … I come across her lately with increasing frequency. I remember her well: that dazed and heedless girl, in love with a drunk, etc. But she would be OK. The thing that she is staked on can’t be gotten at or violated unless by herself.”
She continues.
“When you’re young you spend a certain amount of time finding yourself; but in the middle of this journey of our life, you tend to lose your way. Probably the same amount of time it took to find yourself when you were young, is the amount of time it takes to realize that you have lost your way again and must renew the search.”
FICTION
The Oyster Diaries
By Nancy Lemann
New York Review Books
Published April 7, 2026
Southern Review of Books 