The book Diary is set up like, well, a diary. It's written from the wife's point of view to her husband who is in a coma. It's recounting their entire relationship from her point of view with the angst she feels towards him now. Intermingled between her writing about the past, she's also explaining what's happening in the present. It's called a Coma Diary, "It's what sailors and their wives used to do, Grace said, keep a diary of every day they were apart. It's a treasured old seafaring tradition. After all those months apart, when the come back together, the sailors and wives, they trade diaries and catch up on what they missed." (Location 493)
Is it better to have a book written as a diary? Does it help move the story along in a different way, or is it just confusing?
I think that in the beginning it was confusing, because they hadn't said yet that it was a diary. Once it came out that it was, in fact, a diary, it got a little easier to read. It's still a little jumbled up, but I think that's how Palahniuk meant for it to be. I think he likes to mess with the reader's mind a little bit, so he purposefully made it a little difficult to read. Either way, it's a fantastic book, and I do think that having it set up as a diary really adds to the story.
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