I don’t know if you’ve ever picked up another person’s diary. I’ve done it maybe twice. First comes the glee of intimacy, then the shivery thrill of transgression, then you have to decide whether you’re going to hang on and take a ride through somebody else’s inner life or quit while you’re still ethically clean. Novelists and non-fiction writers alike use the diary as a straight shot into the literary jugular. The diary is just a form, a shape that words can take—like a letter, or a telegram—but its contents are always intimate. When a book starts ‘Dear diary,’ there’s no way of knowing who the writer is talking to, what they’re going to say, or whether any of it is really true. All you can really predict is that shit is going to get personal. Here are ten of the deepest and darkest in print memoir.

I KNOW MY OWN HEART: THE DIARIES OF ANNE LISTER, 1791-1840  

Lister lived from 1791 to 1840. She was also an out lesbian. Known as “Gentleman Jack” around town in Halifax, England, Lister wrote part of her journals in a secret code based on Ancient Greek and algebra. Scholar Helena Whitbread painstakingly deciphered her entries in the ‘80s, revealing a queer memoir of thrilling and heartbreaking frankness, as in the entry for Saturday, 12th of July 1823: ‘Could not sleep last night. Dozing, hot & disturbed...a violent longing for a female companion came over me. Never remember feeling it so painfully before...It was absolute pain to me.’

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER, CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1982)

Gilman’s short story takes the form of a diary written by Jane, whose husband has locked her in a yellow-papered attic to “recover” from some nervous complaint. As she disintegrates mentally, the wallpaper comes alive: ‘There are things in that paper which nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.’ The story grew out of Gilman’s own experiences as a woman misdiagnosed by a chauvinistic doctor in psychology’s infancy.

DIARY OF A DRUG FIEND, ALEISTER CROWLEY (1922)

The notorious occultist’s semi-fictional account of a drug-fuelled love affair spans several European countries and some very sticky situations as the narcotics and luck run out. First prize to Crowley for snagging the pun ‘The Heroine Heroin’ in a chapter title while Warren G. Harding was still the President. Dark, nasty, fun, magic.

NAUSEA, JEAN PAUL SARTRE (1938)

Sartre’s debut novel takes the form of the hero Antoine Roquentin’s diary. 30 years old and besieged by a near-inexpressible malaise, Roquentin wrestles his journal into a cornerstone of existential thought. I picked it off a bookshelf when I was about ten and cried myself to sleep for a month. ‘I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!’

MIRAGES: THE UNEXPURGATED DIARY OF ANAÏS NIN, (1939—1947)

The diary of the twentieth century’s most iconic writer of erotica has been available for half a century, but in 2013 the full, uncut edition was published. Nin’s recollections are of course deeply suffused by sex, but also full of astonishingly touching moments, as in her remembrances of conversations in an abortion clinic in 1940.

Z FOR ZACHARIAH, ROBERT C. O'BRIEN (1974)

This post-apocalyptic sci fi novel is a masterpiece of the first-person form. Ann Burdon is 16 years old and thinks she’s the only survivor of a nuclear/nerve gas global disaster, living alone in a valley. Then, a stranger arrives. The novel’s only two characters lock into a psychological battle that the journal form only renders more complex and compelling.

MOURNING DIARY, ROLAND BARTHES (1977-79)

For two years in the late ‘70s, Barthes wrote through an all-consuming grief for his beloved, dead mother like a polar explorer fighting through a blizzard. The entries are stark, short, epigrammatic—snapshots of the elegant scenes only a brain deranged with grief can conjure. ‘October 30th: …that this death fails to destroy me altogether means that I want to live wildly, madly, and that therefore the fear of my own death is always there, not displaced by a single inch.’

THE HEROIN DIARIES: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A SHATTERED ROCK STAR, NIKKI SIXX (1987)

Mötley Crüe’s irrepressible bassist kept a remarkable diary throughout the year he gave us glam metal’s crowning laurel, Girls, Girls, Girls. Sixx is a writer of surprising adroitness, considering how utterly addled he was on smack at the time. Brutal, sordid, and hilarious by turns, The Heroin Diaries are a defining moment in the history of drugs, tunes, and human sexuality: ‘My dick didn't seem to be aware that she was there. She kept asking me what was wrong, and I was so out of it that I thought she meant what was wrong with the world, so I started talking about global poverty and shit. I'm not surprised she left. I suspect she won't be coming back.’

DEAR DIARY, LESLEY ARFIN (2007)

Girls writer Lesley Arfin’s diary spans her life from 12 and 25, a brightly-lit polaroid of a ‘90s alt teen experience. This record of one girl’s journey through the shitstorms of Long Island, adolescence and heroin is always funny and incisive, never self-indulgent.

SHEILA HETI'S ONLINE DIARIES

Heti has been keeping a diary since 2005. She entered all of their 30,000 sentences into Excel so that they could be arranged independently of the paragraphs they originally formed. Alphabetised, the sentences have resulted in an electrifying piece in Brooklyn’s best literary mag n+1, an experimental twitter feed and a book, still in progress:

Don’t worry about LA.

Don’t worry about New York.

Don’t worry too much about self-help literature.

Don’t you want your pussy licked out?—I laughed into my hand.