Burning the Diaries is about a who is dying burning 40 years of her diaries. Her reason for doing this is so no one else could read them when she’s gone in including her children. She says that diaries are irresistible. And knows that if she leaves her dairies untainted that someone will get curious and start reading her diaries which were private and also had some intimate details she didn’t want anyone to know. But she also goes on to mention that she has a blog that she posts on to take about her daily life. This is hypocritical to me because she’s giving pieces of her life to an audience but is burning her diaries so that no one will get too much information about her.
My question is why wouldn’t she want her children to learn from her mistakes? The Arthur says “Burning those diaries, I realized I didn’t want my sons to know how profoundly I had suffered from the slides down the chutes, the tumbles through the holes that gaped open in the scaffolding of my life. That would be too hard for them. I wanted them to remember me as one who clambers back.” But wouldn’t reading about the problems that she had to get through give them hope when they are going through similar situations?
I think that burning her dairies was a mistake because I think that someone could her benefited from reading them. I think if her boys would have gotten ahold of them that they would have gotten to know their mother on a more personal level. Me personally, If I kept a journal, I would have saved my dairies for my daughter because I want her to know me, the real me. Like she said in her article “I should know. I spent years as an adolescent rooting around in my parents’ closets looking for letters, sorting through boxes of letters and photographs, riffling through sock drawers, searching for clues about who they were, how they came together, why on earth I was on earth?” I just don’t understand why she would rob her boys her getting to understand her life better. And if she decided one day that my diaries are something that should be destroyed, I would trust her to make the right decision. But for me I would be happy to read a family member dairy because I believe that it would be a part of history. But I wouldn’t want to read a girlfriend’s diary because I feel that it would belong to her family.
You have an interesting take on the subject, I also thought the woman in Burning Your Diaries was a bit hypocritical. This is quite a long post with just text. Maybe try smaller sections for each point you make and adding in some pictures to grab the readers attention. Also, try rereading your post out loud before you post it, just to catch the little grammar mistakes.
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