One of the most popular meanings of redemption has a religious connotation. From the dictionary, redemption is the action of being saved by God from evil, or clearing a debt. But what does the word mean to those who don’t have a God or don’t believe in a religion? In True Notebooks by Mark Salzman, the incarcerated teens he works with dream about a second chance and expressed it in their writing, yearning for an opportunity to fix their lives from what they had become. As demonstrated by True Notebooks, redemption means coming to a realization and saving oneself.

In Mark’s writing class, many of the teens come to realize how unhappy they truly are after taking time to evaluate what they have become and where they land themselves. One of the students, Kevin Jackson, writes about what he would do if he had a second chance for freedom. He writes, “I know that if I do get the blessing of receiving my freedom back, I will try to do something that will help me to feel like I have a meaning on this earth…” (Salzman 54). Even though it is revealed at the end of the book that he is sent to jail, he dreams about how he would redeem himself and turn his criminal actions into something good. He realizes how he has hurt the victims of his crime, and saves himself from such an outburst by expressing his feelings in writing than by his fists.

Duc comes to the juvenile hall two years after coming from Vietnam and is mercilessly teased because of his name. When Mark gives him the Vietnamese-English dictionary, it is a large turning point in his life and he is able to express himself in writing more than when he has just started. “From that day on, Duc became the most hardworking student in the class, and his language skills improved at an astonishing rate” (Salzman 224). With the dictionary he is able to keep in his room, Duc saves himself from the life of being locked in a language barrier and finds a way to get this thoughts out to others.

While writing his book, Mark loses his writing spirit and comes to a rut, constantly pulling out his hair over his writing block. Then after arriving to a tranquil cabin in New Hampshire, the spark hits him again and he finishes his book by the time he came back. “Once I’d seen the problem, its solution came effortlessly; I sat down and started writing…” (Salzman 322). By reevaluating his writing and why he has stopped after producing so much, he is able to figure out how to continue and finally end his story while saving himself from another long writer’s block.

True Notebooks is a nonfiction story of many people overcoming their challenges in life, solving one problem after another and learning how to deal with their outcomes. Although freedom is uncertain to the teens in juvenile hall writing class, they are able to redeem themselves in some way by self-evaluation or communicating through writing. Even the author himself is helped, finishing his book that he has been writing for three years.