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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
