In his diaries Leonard Michaels reports on some very neurotic people, including himself. The Diaries of Leonard Michaels, 1961-1995. Michaels began to keep a diary in 1961 after a loud fight with a girlfriend.
Diaries are a more substantial and traditional recourse.
Michaels carried personal omerta to the point of lugging his stack of notebooks, bound with twine, wherever he went, mainly so nobody would find and read them. As it turns out, the diaries too had thin walls. Seven years ago, Michaels, a fiction writer and longtime teacher, drew material from the diaries for ''Sylvia,'' a novel about a brilliant and destructive woman. The book was striking and in some ways impressive, but as a novel it didn't work very well. It was a quarrel related by a still-bleeding narrator, and not a lover's quarrel, exactly, though there was love in it.