Yesterday I finished reading a book where the main character spent years writing the story of her life. As well as meticulously detailing all her heartbreaks and mistakes, the pages explained to her now fifteen year old son why she abandoned him when he was four.

Towards the end of the book, a stranger arrives to inform her of her imminent death. She hands him the manuscript and asks him to promise to burn every word. Then she dies. The stranger takes the manuscript to a beach and, without reading a word, builds a bonfire and burns it to ashes. The son lives on. He has to come to terms with the abandonment without reading why.

This made me wonder: what purpose did it serve the woman to write everything down and then burn it without showing anyone? I think I understand. I had my own similar experience.

When I was a little girl my parents drank a lot. My father was a violent alcoholic and a dictator. Excessive consumption of vodka was one way my mother rebelled against him. It may have empowered her, but it nearly destroyed me. Together, the two of them stole my childhood in ways too evil to tell. When I grew up I escaped to University as soon as I was legally able. I spent the next six or seven years working through my early traumas by writing them down. I scribbled on paper with pen or printed from word processor. The volume of my life grew into hundreds of pages of musings, flashbacks and memories. It was crudely lashed together with staples and Sellotape.

Every time I moved house, I carried this weighty document around like a dark, guilty secret. It contained every sordid little detail, every embarrassing moment, every humiliating scene and every darkest revenge fantasy. I daren't throw it in the bin in case someone found and read it. When I moved in with my boyfriend I bought a box to seal the document inside. The box went in the garage. Every time someone went in there I froze. If someone were to discover and read the document, they would discover and read my soul. They would know everything.

I read a poem once about a boy who killed a cat. He hid the cat's body in the cupboard under the stairs in his house. In his mind the cat grew and grew inside the cupboard. Inevitably one day the cupboard would burst open and an enormous black cat would come striding out. The day his horrific secret was revealed...

This is what my guilty document was like. My awareness of it grew every day. One night I confessed to my boyfriend that this terrible secret lay in the garage. He nodded, understanding. Together we made a fire in the back garden, ignoring the neighbours' twitching curtains. And we burned it all. No one ever read it except me, not even my boyfriend as he tore pages from it to feed the hungry flames. The words became black smoke and swirled and vanished into the air.

That writing was not for reading. The words were not even for me to read. What was important was the act of writing, a confession. Burning the pages lifted the weight of the guilt from my shoulders. I was free. Just like the woman in the book.

Why do we write I wonder? What is an unread work? It is a one-sided conversation, a monologue that no one hears. Is that a waste?

I have stories in my head. Storied that I want to write down, that I need to write down. But does anyone else need to read them? I wonder about trying to get published. Is that important? Maybe it is not. Maybe we write because we need to. Maybe it is not a career move or a search for fame or riches. Maybe it is simply an expression of what is deep within ourselves. Maybe that is all. Maybe that is enough...