Based on a successful novel by Sue Kaufman, this screenplay is given a "woman's touch"-that of Eleanor Perry, and it is vicious. Again, as with The Subterraneans, it is a film of its moment-mid-Women's Lib-and because of the intensity of the moment few reviewers allowed it to be the satire it was, with gargoyles as grotesque in their New Yorkish way as Flannery O'Connor's in theirs. Richard Benjamin as the smug, upwardly mobile lawyer-husband is loathsome in a precise manner and it is no accident that Carrie Snodgrass's Tina Balser has a daytime affair with an artier version of same. As Nigel Andrews wrote, "If Axelrod called his Secret Life of An American Wife-with which the Perrys' satire has much in common-'comic Ibsen', then Diary is comic Strindberg, its real dramatic life centered in the cannibalization of marriage itself rather than the creative alternatives outside it."