# Grasso_The self is present_ diaries and imagination **Abstract:** In this paper, I argue that personal diaries of the verbal kind are artifacts that perform a dual function: (1) recording the self, and (2) offering an experience of the represented self. Following (1), personal diaries are artifacts put to personal use by the diarist; following (2), diaries acquire an additional function when they become available to the community of readers as experiential artifacts. Understanding artifacts as constituted by a structure that determines their function(s), I argue that diaries possess a distinctive structure that distinguishes them from other forms of self-writing (autobiography, memoir, confession). In §1, I present two criteria that serve as jointly sufficient conditions for a subject to constitute the diary qua artifact through acts of recording, and I explain why it cannot be accounted for in terms of narrative. In §2, I elaborate on the engagement involved in the experience of diaries: experientially imagining the “other self”, both as fragmented and as unitary.