"If You Are Reading This, I’m Dead"

On keeping journals and what happens to them once you die.

I am sorry for the misleading start. I’m (hopefully) not dead yet. I am however fascinated with an old Reddit thread what happens with your journals once you die? Some say—burn! Others want to publish. They write their deepest thoughts with audience in mind.

No matter the side, there’s a peculiar intimacy in the act of keeping a diary. It is a sort of scream into the void, by definition, a private exchange between oneself and the paper, ideally unencumbered by judgment, prying eyes, or the need to make sense.

David Rieff, Susan Sontag’s son, committed an act of posthumous intimacy: he published three volumes of his mother’s diaries. The extent of Sontag's consent regarding the posthumous publication of her diaries remains a subject of debate. In the preface to the first volume, Reborn, he admits to agonizing over whether to publish the notebooks at all. He ultimately decided that Sontag’s legacy as a writer and thinker demanded it. According to New Yorker, he may never had published his mother’s journals had it been up to him but Sontag left little to chance. She left her legacy to UCLA, and Rieff felt it was better to organize and present the diaries himself.

I am no Sontag but I do keep a lot of journals. I write morning pages religiously. I have a diary, a creativity journal, a poetry notebook.

But what happens after I’m gone? What if my children one day read all about my sex life? In some instances, I don’t shy away from descriptions. Do I want Bean to know that her mother was (well, still is!) a wild and sexual being with dreams and hopes and lots and lots of desires?

My morning pages are the dumping grounds for thoughts that don’t deserve the light of day: mostly fillers, but also passing judgments, observations, insecurities, dreams and lots of prayers. I am not a religious person but I do spend a lot of space talking to God or the Universe (I use them interchangeably) and finish most of the morning pages with a prayer from A Course in Miracles: Where would you have me go? What would you have me do? What would you have me say, and to whom? Sometimes, when there is no space left on a page, I shorten it to “How can you use me today?”

Reading old entries is a humbling and sometimes jarring experience. It’s mostly almost painfully boring. These pages aren’t written with an audience in mind; they’re the opposite of polished. They reveal me in my most unguarded state: vulnerable, flawed, trivial, occasionally unhinged. But then again, isn’t this part of the appeal? It perhaps captures the truth of a person in a way no other medium can. They don’t conform to the narratives we craft for public consumption; they’re honest in a way that’s messy, unedited, and profoundly human. If someone were to read my morning pages, they might see me not as the curated version of myself I worked so hard to project, but as a person in all her complexity: hopeful, broken, striving, failing, and loving, and (sadly) the bit that bothers me the most—utterly utterly banal. No, thank you. Good news is even if they could, no one would ever actually want to read it, so boring it is.

My diaries, unlike my morning pages, have literary potential. (I feel like a man writing this, so sure of myself!) Sometimes, I curate them, shaping entries as if someone will eventually read it. I don’t do it on purpose but I do it nevertheless. The rawness gets polished, the chaos organized, and the sentences become deliberate. I am essentially crafting a narrative instead of confessing. Even in my most vulnerable moments, there’s a part of me that wonders how these words might be perceived, as if the act of writing for myself isn’t quite enough. It’s strange to feel this duality—to long for honesty but to package it in a way that feels presentable. I am fully aware of it afterwards, but in the process is a subconscious ordeal.

I do hope one day to achieve a level of literary importance so that someone would actually want to read them. But would I let them?

You can not have a conversation on diaries without mentioning Anaïs Nin¹. Nin herself meticulously prepared her journals for public consumption during her lifetime. Nin’s diaries, sprawling across decades, became integral to her literary identity—so much so that the boundary between her private and public self grew increasingly porous. Yet even Nin’s deliberate act of exposing her inner world raises questions about authenticity, vulnerability, and the consequences of turning private musings into public artifacts.

Nin’s decision to edit and publish her diaries complicates their legacy. How much of what we read is the “real” Anaïs Nin, and how much is the version she wanted us to see? Her diaries are both deeply honest and inherently performative, shaped not just by the act of writing but by the act of publishing. In crafting her public self, Nin revealed the paradox of the diary: even the most private form of writing is, in some sense, a performance—an attempt to make sense of the self for an imagined audience, even if that audience is the future self rereading the pages. She famously wrote “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” But we also, perhaps, write to be seen?

Sylvia Plath never intended to publish her diaries. Does it make them more authentic than diaries of Anaïs Nin, more accurate, more true?

Nin herself had a clear understanding of what she was doing and why.

NTERVIEWER

There is an interesting quote from Volume One of your Diary, in which you say, “I only regret that everyone wants to deprive me of the journal, which is the only steadfast friend I have, the only one that makes my life bearable, because my happiness with human beings is so precarious, my confining moods so rare, and the least sign of non-interest is enough to silence me. In the journal, I am at ease.” I think you were referring to Henry Miller and to certain other friends who didn’t understand your obsession with the diary. You also say, “This diary is my kief, hashish, and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice. Instead of writing a novel, I lie back with this book and a pen, and dream. . . . I must relive my life in the dream. The dream is my only life.” How much of a conflict was there for you in expanding from the privacy of the diary into the novels which, unlike the diary, were meant for immediate public consumption?

NIN

At one moment, it seemed like a conflict. The feeling that Henry Miller had and that Otto Rank had was that the diary was a refuge and a shell, an oyster shell, and that I was going inward instead of coming out to face the world with my fiction, since I concentrated on writing something which couldn’t be shown to people. The conflict doesn’t exist for me anymore. I see them as being interrelated, the novels and the diary. I see that the fiction helped me to write better for the diary; it helped me to develop the diary in a more interesting way, to communicating a whole series of events. I feel now that they were really nourishing each other. At one time, I seemed to be trapped in the sense that I couldn’t do the outside writing. I was more comfortable not facing the world, not publishing, not facing criticism; I was hypersensitive about those things. I was more willing to incite others to write.

From a conversation with Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) recorded at her home in Los Angeles in 1976.

Funny enough, in the same interview, se mentions “never erasing or crossing out.” Perhaps, the editing process comes later.

Diaries hold secrets. There’s a certain unfairness in the idea of these secrets being exposed after we are no longer around to explain, contextualize, or defend them. What if someone misinterprets your words, reads too much into an offhand comment, or uses your vulnerability to reduce you to a single facet of your identity? The fear of being misunderstood extends even beyond the grave.

And yet, there’s also a kind of freedom in this exposure. Death strips away the ego. We won’t be there to feel the embarrassment or indignation of being laid bare. And hopefully, that exposure doesn’t hurt others. Nin herself published her journals first heavily edited partly to not hurt or embarrass her husband.

If I’m honest, the idea of my diaries outliving me carries a strange allure. Diaries are inherently temporal; they document the passage of days, weeks, and years, and yet they are acts of defiance against oblivion. They are for the self, by the self. And in this way, they become a testament to the fact that you were here, that you felt, and that you mattered. To imagine someone discovering them after you are gone is to imagine a kind of immortality.

Diaries are proof that you lived. That alone is worth something.

1. Fun fact: I love Anaïs Nin and write about her often. I however have absolutely no idea where ï is on a keyboard, so I have to copy paste her name every time I mention her.