Literary gold … or betrayal of trust? Joan Didion journal opens ethical minefield

Soon we can all read the late author’s private notes about her therapy. But should we?. In 1998, the late journalist Joan Didion wrote a scathing essay about the posthumous publication of True at First Light, a travel journal and fictional memoir by Ernest Hemingway, 38 years after the author killed himself. “This is a man to whom words mattered. He worked at them, he understood them, he got inside them,” Didion wrote. “His wish to be survived by only the words he determined fit for publication would have seemed clear enough.”.

Just over a year later, in December 1999, Didion began writing her own journal about her sessions with a psychiatrist. She addressed these notes – detailing her struggles with alcoholism, anxiety, guilt and depression, a sometimes fraught relationship with her adopted daughter Quintana and reflections on her childhood and legacy – to her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

The announcement that these post-psychiatry notes, discovered by Didion’s literary executors in an unlabelled folder shortly after she died in 2021, are to be published in April has raised questions around the ethics of posthumous publishing. Didion left no instructions to her trustees – her literary editor Lynn Nesbit, and two of her longtime editors, Shelley Wanger and Sharon DeLano – about how to handle the deeply private journal after her death from complications of Parkinson’s disease.

In total, 46 entries were found – printed out and placed in chronological order – in a portable filing cabinet next to her desk. They will be published in their entirety, with only minimal editing, such as footnotes and corrections of typos, under the title Notes to John.

The book is already being hyped as “an unmissable publication” from “one of the most iconic writers of our time” by its UK publisher 4th Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins. According to the publisher, the “meticulous” notes of conversations Didion had with her psychiatrist were central to Didion’s understanding of the themes she turned to in her celebrated late works, such as her memoirs The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, in which she writes about Quintana and John’s deaths.

A close friend of Didion, who wished to remain anonymous, told the Observer: “I have no doubt that this document will further our collective astonishment at Joan’s work, but I also cannot think of anything more private than notes kept about one’s psychiatry sessions. It’s not my place to say what Joan would have wanted, but as someone who loved her very much, the publication of these pages makes me terrifically sad.”.

They said that, after discovering that Didion’s literary executors had decided to publish the notes, several of Didion’s closest friends and family members had shared similar feelings of disappointment and anguish: “The collective feeling in her inner circle is that her privacy has been betrayed … While I, of course, understand the public thirst for this document, given Joan’s extraordinary place in American letters, Joan was nothing if not meticulous and intentional with the details she decided to share – and not share – in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. Anything beyond that seems to me a tremendous betrayal of her privacy by the people she trusted the most.”.

Dr Rod Rosenquist, who lectures at the University of Northampton on the ethics of posthumous publishing, said the journal was bound to generate interest due to the “cult of Joan Didion”, which saw items such as her $12 blank notebooks fetch $9,000 at the auction of her estate by her heirs in 2022. “She is a celebrity writer within literary circles … and what I think is so interesting about public figures is that they are owned – manipulated in some ways – by the public,” he said.

Readers are hungry to better understand the inner life of an author they admire, he added: “That’s the very nature of celebrity.”. It is for this reason that writers such as Henry James and Charles Dickens burned their personal papers while they were still alive. But since Didion did not do this or instruct her literary executors not to publish the notes, leaving them “carefully organised” near her desk, where they were bound to be found, then “legally everyone’s acting within their rights and acting in ways that the market encourages them to act”, he said.

Sign up to Observed. Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers. after newsletter promotion. On an ethical and emotional level, however, he personally found the decision to publish Notes to John “disturbing”: “I don’t feel comfortable with anyone’s private journals being published this early.” Although there has been “public interest” in posthumously publishing the journal of a great writer many years after their death, he thinks that, even in these circumstances, therapy should be protected. “That’s my position. But I do think it’s debatable.”.