The Revenge of the '80s

I love diaries. Unlike memoirs, which are written long after the fact — with the benefit of hindsight and nearly always in a way that flatters the author — diaries are history in real time, as it was lived.

Unlike the biographer, the diarist does not know which side will win the war, which titan will tumble, which bit player will rise to power.

For this reason, I loved Tina Brown’s “Vanity Fair Diaries,” which covers the period between 1983 and 1992, when she edited the glossy magazine Vanity Fair. They tell, in prose that veers from the dazzling to the dutiful — depending on her mood and level of fatigue — several gripping stories.

There is the story of one of the first female editors of a major publication; the story of an immigrant making it big in the Big Apple; the story of the central trilemma of the feminist era — that it is impossible simultaneously to be successful (and contented) as a professional, a mother, and a wife. (In a trilemma, you can have two out of three, but not all three.) All of this kept me turning the pages.

The obvious historical value of Brown’s diaries is that they capture, vividly, the high noon and then the dusk of the Reagan era, as viewed from Manhattan. On Wall Street, the 1980s were a time of deal-making and high-rolling, of junk bonds and boorish traders. Yet just a short distance away, in Bohemian neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, the HIV/AIDS epidemic was decimating the gay community.