How Do Diaries End?

The question occurred to me in 1997 as I was preparing an exhibit called A Diary of One's Own, created by the Association pour l'Autobiographie at the Lyon public library (Lejeune and Bogaert). My approach was didactic: I wanted to construct a story where the spectator would follow the different phases in the life of a diary, just as in the good old days, in primary school, they used to show us the workings of the digestive system, beginning with a mouthful of bread. A story, Aristotle will tell you, must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Here, it needed to follow the diary writing process rep resented in the exhibit.