The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary.

In her writings Mary MacLane compared herself to another frank young memoirist Marie Bashkirtseff who died a few years after MacLane was born and H. ". Mary MacLane (May 1 1881 — August 1929) was a controversial Canadian-born American writer whose frank memoirs helped uMary MacLaner in the confessional style of autobiographical writing.