A new start after 60: I read out my old diaries online – and my youthful secrets went viral | Life and style

Betsy Lerner doesn’t see herself as a TikTok star – although the New York Instances described her as one – or an influencer. Which means fee and swag – all she’s had is a free pen. “I actually do it for myself,” she says, “and for the individuals who observe me”.Lerner, 64, has for 20 years labored as a literary agent for writers together with Patti Smith and Temple Grandin. She’s an creator of nonfiction and now of a debut novel, Shred Sisters – “a love letter to loneliness”. However the “doing” she’s speaking about is on TikTok, the place she has amassed 1.5m likes for movies wherein she reads from the diaries she wrote in her turbulent 20s.“You don’t know who you’ll love, who will love you, what you’ll do for work, what’s your objective,” she says in a single publish. “This morning I discovered one line in my diary that simply sums [your 20s] up: ‘I really feel as if I don’t know who I’m, in the present day.’”Lerner posts in her dressing robe, with out make-up. Initially she explored BookTok to assist her authors. However together with her personal novel forthcoming, she began posting, digicam off, and bought no followers. “A buddy informed me, it’s essential to be on digicam and consider it as your individual TV channel … I believed, ‘Nicely, perhaps I’ll learn from my outdated diaries.’”She’d stored one from the age of 11, after studying Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Younger Woman. “I wrote my first poems in there. I vented. I attempted to analyse myself …” Her journals from the ages of 12 to 18 had been misplaced when her automobile was stolen, however these from her 20s – about 30 volumes – had been stowed in a crawl house in her attic.“My diaries are very unhappy. They’re all about being lonely, in search of love, in search of friendship, making an attempt to determine who I used to be,” she says.Lerner describes herself as “a late bloomer”. She was accepted on to Columbia’s MFA poetry programme at 26, coming into publishing in her late 20s when most editorial assistants had been recent from faculty. “I didn’t fall in love until I used to be 30. I’d by no means had any important relationships … I misplaced a variety of my teenage years and most of my 20s battling melancholy.”‘It’s all about making an attempt to attach and talk’ … Betsy Lerner, photographed in New Haven, Connecticut. {Photograph}: Nicole Frappier/The GuardianWhen she was 15, her mother and father had taken her to a psychiatrist, and she or he had been recognized with bipolar dysfunction. “I didn’t wish to settle for that I had this sickness. I fought it rather a lot,” she says. Her 2003 memoir, Meals and Loathing, paperwork her relationship together with her weight, meals, melancholy and extra, and at one level in her late 20s describes her straddling a ledge on a bridge above the Hudson River.The turning level got here at 30. She discovered a psychopharmacologist – who “found out” the best lithium dosage (they’ve labored collectively for 35 years) – and she or he bought married.Her diaries stopped. She had written them alone in mattress at evening. However now, “I simply didn’t really feel that unhappy and lonely any extra”, she says.For years, Lerner says, “I gravitated towards a variety of depth.” Now, “I prioritise stability over all the pieces.”She had by no means thought she’d write a novel. However in 2019 she got here by means of “4 very tragic deaths”. She misplaced her mom, then her teenage niece and nephew, Ruby and Hart Campbell, who had been killed by a drunk driver, and her greatest buddy, the author George Hodgman, who died by suicide. “I nonetheless don’t know who I’m grieving for at any given time,” she says.Within the aftermath of those deaths she began to put in writing Shred Sisters, partly impressed by the web exercises – shredding – she and her two sisters did throughout Covid to deal with one another, and as “a manner of working by means of all of that grief”. She is already writing one other novel, and for so long as there may be materials within the diaries, and there may be TikTok, she’s going to proceed to share them. “It’s all about making an attempt to attach and talk,” she says.“There’s a relentless stream of feedback from children of their 20s who establish with my struggles. That’s actually what retains me going. I really feel this connection to those children … I attempt to say, I felt the identical. Dangle in. Some coronary heart emojis. Just a bit one thing to say, ‘You’re recognised.’” Shred Sisters is out now, printed by Verve Books. To assist the Guardian, order a duplicate from the Guardian bookshop. Supply charges might apply. Inform us: has your life taken a brand new path after the age of 60? Within the UK and Eire, Samaritans may be contacted on freephone 116 123, or electronic mail jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. Within the US, you’ll be able to name or textual content the Nationwide Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or textual content HOME to 741741 to attach with a disaster counselor. In Australia, the disaster assist service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Different worldwide helplines may be discovered at befrienders.org