Dominique Browning wrote a thought-provoking essay in Sunday's New York Times (10/2/11) called "Burning the Evidence" – about pitching forty years of her diaries into a blazing fire. (Link below.) What to do with your diaries/journals is a questions all writers ask themselves. I threw out my teenage diary with its pink plastic cover, useless key, and four years of blithering about boys, and it felt liberating to simply get rid of that ditsy teenager. But now I too have over forty years of college-ruled notebooks – journals with the good times of my adult life jotted down in haste and then pages and pages of the bad times with all my mewling and whining about it. 

What I think I'm going to do is to rewrite my journals. Cut out all the whining and bad behavior and create a more interesting, grounded persona on the page. At least that's been my plan. But I now have three books on the back burner to write, and the idea of rehashing the past forty years is not only daunting but dull. So I'm not sure what I'm going to do. But if I get hit by a bus in the next year or so, would someone remember to please tell R. and my daughters to throw out all those hundreds of notebooks in my office. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/fashion/burning-your-diaries-first-person.html?

Do you keep a journal? What are your plans for it? Let us know under Comments.