Learning how to live: “Diários, 1935-1936”, by Eunice Penna Kehl

Abstract

Diários: 1935-1936 gathers the inaugural writing of Eunice Penna Khel (1901-1980), an educated, middle class woman who registered her day-to-day life between 1935 and 1970 in fourteen notebooks. Published in full, the two first volumes bring the notes of the diarist on  family and social life, and domestic routine, when she lived with her husband and children in Rio de Janeiro. The trauma experienced by Eunice with the death of her first born, caused by septicemia, in october 1935, marks the diaries with a before and after. The review discusses that change and the practice of the diary from the Foucauldian perspective of the practices of the self.