I have said privately (and I’m sure publicly) for years that I intend to have my diaries shredded, that I was only waiting until the memoir was done. These Two Hands is published (Makaro Press) so I am now free to do this. I mentioned my plans to a couple of friends, one a writer ad one an academic/writer and both are appalled and begged me to reconsider. I’m wondering how others feel. Does anyone understand why I will shred my diaries? I mean does anyone really think it matters? Seriously?
And would anyone bother? A desperate student perhaps?
My skin crawls at the idea of someone scratching through my diaries when I’m dead, making assumptions that are probably wrong, drawing conclusions that are nowhere near the truth but most of all thinking they have the right to do this. It feels really creepy. I have only to think of some of the comments on my novel Kissing Shadows, (published Huia 2006), a fictionalised account of my mother amd father’s lives. It had to be fictional because I literally don’t know a lot of the answers to the puzzles. Fiction means I made it up. Only in the broadest sense were the characters real, that is they started in my head as real people but as writer knows, they soon took on other lives. This is what happens. This is why its called fiction. But in some quarters it was received as though all I’d done was repeat a factual story so it wasn’t really a novel at all.
So what would happen to the cryptic comments, appointment records, terse phrases, hurried scrawls, that litter the pages of my diaries? What interpretations might be put on them? I only have to look at what has been written about other writers to see that.
‘You owe something to posterity.’ Do I? Really? I owe something to theatres and directors, to actors, and I owe something to publishers and most of all I owe heaps to theatregoers, readers, family and friends. That is why I wrote These Two Hands. You’ve all taken a risk on me.
I’ve produced the work though. The works are there. Surely that’s enough?
