The Secrets of the Drawer is an anthology of diary entries, from the early moments of the emergence of the genre (the emblematic pioneer being the British Samuel Pepys, who began keeping a diary on New Year's Day in 1660) to its great explosion in the 20th century (Kafka, Woolf, Anaïs Nin, Max Frisch, B. Gombrowicz, Sylvia Plath).

It features one hundred and thirty remarkable diarists, including writers, musicians, visual artists, thinkers, and everyday people, who turned to the solitude of their hearts, developed the idea of self-realization, externalized their inner depths, proclaimed their uniqueness, and sought recognition for it—even as a record in a secret notebook.

One may wonder, of course, what the meaning of such an anthology is in times when there is an unprecedented diffusion of self-narratives, an uncontrolled spread of discourse about the self, no longer confined to the pages of a sealed notebook but now displayed on computer screens.

But in order to see how one engaged with their ghosts and sorrows before deciding to dwell in a glass house, what one publicly suppressed and what one privately confessed, before the boundaries between the public and private spheres, the inside and the outside, the subject and the object became fluid and interchangeable, calling to mind the topology of the Möbius strip.

And certainly, in support of the enigma—of what every human life is.