The Quarantine Diaries

Before the end of life as we knew it, Ady, an 8-year-old who lives in the Bay Area of San Francisco, read a biography of Anne Frank.

When she realized that she, too, was living through what would soon become history, Ady started keeping her own diary. 

In one early entry, she recorded that the judging for her county’s science fair would be conducted over the phone, rather than in person. “Not ‘fair’!!” she wrote. “Har, har, very funny.”

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As the coronavirus continues to spread and confine people largely to their homes, many are filling pages with their experiences of living through a pandemic. Their diaries are told in words and pictures: pantry inventories, window views, questions about the future, concerns about the present. 

Taken together, the pages tell the story of an anxious, claustrophobic world on pause.