I told my daughter over lunch at our favorite hamburger joint that upon my death, which, as far as I knew, was not imminent, I wanted to leave the diaries and journals I’ve been keeping since I was eleven years old to my granddaughter, Chloe, who was three at the time. My daughter didn’t even pause to consider the idea.
“Absolutely not,” she said calmly, reaching for the ketchup. “She doesn’t need to know all that.”
“All what?” I said, surprised by her reaction.
“All that,” she said, raising her eyebrows as if I knew perfectly well what all that was, so she wasn’t required to provide any specifics.
“You’ve never even read my journals!”
I knew this to be true since she had politely declined my offer to provide her with unlimited access to them when I thought she might be curious somewhere around her fifteenth birthday. I didn’t want her to have to sneak and read them the way I did when I discovered a volume of my own mother’s diary, carefully concealed in the back of her closet. That discovery made me understand for the first time that my mother had a rich interior life, not to mention a sex life, that didn’t include me at all. Far from being hurt by this, it deepened my affection and respect for my mother, who had now been revealed to me as a mysterious, passionate, creative woman engaged in a valiant struggle to balance love and freedom.
My daughter didn’t see it that way. She saw the journals as uncensored, unedited slices of my life, meant for my eyes only. Any attempt to include others in such an intimate experience, after the fact and through no fault of their own, struck my child as self-indulgent, insensitive and unnecessary.
“Aren’t you even curious?” I said.
“Curious about what?” my daughter said.
“About my life,” I said. “About what happened.”
“Mom,” she said gently but firmly, “I know what happened. I was there, remember?”
After that it seemed wiser to move on to more neutral topics, but I couldn’t get her reaction out of my mind. If part of any sane woman’s life is figuring out how to spot the lies, remember the lessons and engage passionately in the love affairs, aren’t my journals among the most primary of primary sources? And even though my daughter is telling me they are probably nothing more than a toxic brew of rage, whining, scandalous behavior and unreliable memories, I am not convinced.
After all, she only has one half of the equation to consider. Yes, she was there, but my daughter was not privy to the relentless soul searching, merciless self-observation and rigorous self-analysis that allowed me to survive my early womanhood and emerge with my health and sanity still relatively intact. Those crucial conversations only took place in the pages of my journals, where clarity came slowly, over years, and the resulting behavioral changes occurred gradually enough that my daughter could not be expected to draw a straight line from one state to the other. She only saw the Sturm und Drang of my mad flight toward financial independence, sexual liberation, creative fulfillment and free womanhood, not necessarily in that order. Looking back, I wonder if it’s possible that the things I didn’t tell her are as necessary as the things I did.
“Do us all a favor,” she says gently, dropping me off at home later. “Burn them up and be done with it.”
I am shocked by her suggestion. If I was going to burn them, I could have done that every year as part of my usual New Year’s rituals: give thanks for what has just finished and what is about to begin; make your resolutions; drink champagne with the beloved; burn your journals. No way. There is a reason why I saved them all these years, carting them from my baby girl bedroom, to my college dorm, to a series of apartments and finally home. There is a reason they have survived and even if I’m not exactly sure what that reason is, I probably ought to think about it a little longer before doing anything as irrevocable as burning. I decide there is only one way to figure out who’s right. I’ll read them all and then decide.
I am surprised to realize how many there are. Stacked in cardboard boxes; stashed in my great grandmother’s Alabama steamer trunk; spilling over the sides of an overflowing and badly tattered basket, demanding organization and attention. They have mutely rebuked me many times as another year passes and I add a few new volumes to their number without going back to be sure that 1967 isn’t crowding 1996 and that those pages I took out from December of 1982 were correctly replaced and not stuck in April of 1984 by mistake. Clearly, the first challenge is narrowing my search for mystery and meaning to a manageable number of notebooks. I need an organizing principle, but based on what? Dates? Times? Places? Decades?
The idea of a couple of decades appeals to me. Twenty years is not enough time to be overwhelming, but it is more than enough to be a representative sample. As best I can recall, the two decades between 1970 and 1990 were pretty action-packed as far as those lies, lessons and love affairs I was talking about earlier. I know for a fact that I left college, moved to Atlanta, got married, finished college, got a job, had a baby, quit a job, wrote a book, helped elect a mayor, quit another job, got divorced, lived by my wits, became an artist, had a play produced, had my heart broken, mended it, found my honor, found my smile, realized I was a lot stronger than I had thought I was. A lot wilder, too, but all that came much farther up the road. This particular twenty-year journey begins in Atlanta on January 9, 1970 . . .