Why Can’t I Just Burn My Diaries If I Don’t Want Anyone to Read Them?

On a cold afternoon last February, I stood in my backyard in Connecticut in front of a fire pit. On a stone wall beside the blaze, I had stacked a pile of journals and diaries. Some were cloth-covered books that had accompanied me from grade school through college. A couple of them had flimsy locks, their tiny useless keys abandoned in junk drawers past. Many later diaries were housed in cardboard boxes, the blank paper they once contained dense with single-spaced, dated entries that I had taken the trouble to print out. One by one, I started feeding pages into the flames.

A few days earlier, I had been diagnosed with a rare malignant tumor in the back of my eye, and I was in the limbo between surgery and radiation. I did not yet know that this thing was not likely to kill me. It was not the first time the thought of death had merged with the thought of the journals. Over the years, when I had been on particularly turbulent flights, feeling a jet shudder and bounce, flight attendants strapped into their jump seats projecting calm, my terrified mind would inevitably leap to the third shelf in my office closet. My journals! Why had I kept them? Why, if, as I was certain, I never wanted a soul to read them?

My husband looked on warily as I opened one box labeled 1990, the year I was 28, about to publish my first novel and on the cusp of entering a short-lived marriage. (My second!) Yeah, 1990 was as good a place as any to start.

I watched pages turn to ash. Initially, this was satisfying. What was I doing? I thought I knew. None of us ever plan on dying, not really, or at least not soon. In a time of experiencing a profound loss of control in the form of the tumor that was blurring my vision, this felt like a consummate act of taking back my life, or at least my story. As the author of multiple memoirs, I was accustomed to controlling my own narrative. People would often tell me they knew everything about me. “You didn’t read my diary,” I’d joke. “If you had, I’d have to kill you.”

I had always thought of my diaries as garbage cans into which I tossed all the detritus: the obsessions, petty jealousies, fantasies, secret crushes, stinging rejections, all to clear the path to my “real” work, which is to say the attempt to make meaning and even beauty out of the chaos of being human. Memoirs are crafted, edited stories, no matter how close to the bone. The decision to include or leave out certain details or scenes or even characters are strategic literary ones. What serves the story? Whereas diaries are, at least initially, dumping grounds. And yet dumping grounds can yield the most fertile soil.

I grabbed more pages from the 1990 box, but before I had a chance to incinerate them, a few sentences caught my attention. I was writing about what it had been like for me as a young writer in New York just starting out. “My agent thinks this draft is really there. When I asked her about breakout potential, though, she said she thought it would be a tough book to break out with because it’s ‘serious and sad.’ But on the other hand, it’s ‘accessible, moves fast, is titillating and sexy.’ In other words, who knows.”