Why Do I Keep Diaries if I'm Afraid for Others to Read Them?

On a brisk February day last year, I found myself by a fire pit in my Connecticut backyard. Stacked beside the crackling flames was a pile of my diaries. They varied in form—from cloth-bound volumes I'd kept during childhood to tattered journals from adulthood. A few bore flimsy locks with their keys long lost. Pages crammed with life’s minutiae were to be set alight, slowly turning into ash.

Not long before, a dire diagnosis loomed over me—a malignant tumor nestled at the back of my eye. Caught in the uncertain pause before treatment, thoughts of mortality bundled tightly with the fate of my journals. I had wrestled this fear before, imagining disastrous flights casting my consciousness to the top shelf in my office, home to my secret diaries. Why burden myself with these relics of the past if I never intended to share them?

My husband stood by as I fumbled through boxes marked with years like 1990, a year in my late twenties. It was a time of my first novel's dawn and the beginning of a fleeting marriage. Seemed like a reasonable place to start burning.

Watching pages transform to ash was unexpectedly reassuring. It was my attempt to regain command of my life's narrative amidst a physical ailment obscuring my vision, a stark reminder of life's unpredictability. As an author of memoirs, my comfort had always been in shaping my story. When acquaintances claimed to know me fully through my writings, I'd quip, "You haven't read the diaries. I'd have to eliminate you if you had."

To me, these diaries resembled refuse bins—the recipients of my intimate musings and petty grievances—clearing space for my primary endeavors to knit chaos into clarity and maybe beauty. Memoirs, unlike diaries, are purposeful creations—constructed and edited with intent. Diary entries, though, serve as raw compost, capable of nourishing future reflections.

Are Diaries Destined for the Flames, or Do They Hold More?

As I turned more pages over to the fire, a few words stopped me. In that writing, I was a young scribe in bustling New York. My agent believed a draft held potential, but she warned it might not breakout—it was 'serious and sad,' yet brisk, engaging, and sensuous. Success, remains uncertain.