And there it should stay

Locked away in some bomb-proof tape storage vault is a draft of a novel. During off-hours, on a VT-52 terminal with a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem, I typed my notes, using DEC Standard Runoff as the markup language. The draft was about 150 pages, printed on the big honkin' fan-fold line printer paper of the day.

It was, as a novel, not very good.
The main character was a guy named Willie, a guy enough like me, but not so much that the details of his life matched up with mine in any real way.  Willie wore a hat. I don't. I'm not a hat guy.
Petersborough was the setting, a New England coastal town. You'd recognize the town and the people. After a while, though, you'd start wondering why you should care. The story went on, like a diary of made-up people.
If you're going to read a diary, read a diary. Sandra has been reading her mother's notes from around that same time, early 1980s. She'd earlier read and transcribed her grandmother's diaries from the 20s and 30s. These from her mother are interesting because we're not the most important characters. It's a touch of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. We're on our own stage, ala Hamlet, but the action occurs elsewhere. It's humbling to realize that not everyone was paying attention to us all of the time.
And, so, if it's stories of people's lives that I want, I'll go to diaries. The print-out of that novel went into the recycling bin and was picked up on Thursday.