What Will You Do With Your Diaries?
If you died unexpectedly, would they be read or destroyed?
I have never been able to keep a proper diary. I bore myself rigid. My days would bore everyone else rigid, too, I suspect. But a new book has just been released which collects diary entries from a wide range of women over a period of years — Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries edited by Sarah Gristwood.
NZ author, Fiona Kidman, has written an intriguing article about this collection, which led me to think about the whole issue of a private diary, and how it might not, one day, be private after all. Imagine if you poured your heart out and then died suddenly. Who would find your diaries? What would they do with them?
It seems that even if you left instructions for them to be destroyed, that might not happen. Who is the most curious member of your family? On the other hand, if you left your diaries to someone special, as Fiona Kidman experienced, what can you do when someone else steps in and destroys them before you can get hold of them?
I used to have what I called a “vomit book”, which was a journal of my most angry, frustrated and lonely days. Hundreds of words that spilled onto the page and made me feel better once I had blurted them all out. When we moved house, I decided it was time to rip all the…